New WD Raptor on the Horizon?

[Spinner]

Neowin (http://www.neowin.net) reports that Western Digital plan to announce a new version of their 10,000RPM Raptor Hard Drives in the new year. Two new flavors of Raptor are slated to be released, one for server based use and the other for high-end game systems, each featuring a much improved capacity of 150GB. Rumored features are:

SATA-II Capabilities w/ NCQ
16MB Cache
4.5ms Seek Time
1.2 million hours MTBF

All this storage and speed comes with a fairly hefty price tag. One vendor in Europe is listing the new server variant at just over $375 American. No official word from Western Digital yet, but the leaked reports claim that the drives will be announced very early on in 2006.
Being a Raptor (x2) owner myself, I can't help but get excited by this news. Looking forward to hearing more about these drives.

There will be a large news roundup coming tomorrow (Christmas Eve), plus Short-Media's annual Christmas message. So don't run off and stuff the Turkey just yet, stay tuned.

Source: Neowin (http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=31867)

[Qeldroma]

I've kind of expected this after seeing the 7200RPM 400GB 16MB cache Caviar nearly outpace my 74GB Raptor. If I get this right, they will transfer this technology to 10KRPM so it will also be perceptibly faster than the current Raptor and- hopefully- significantly quieter. The WD4000 is the largest, fastest, and quietest 7200RPM I have ever owned.

Expect it to be the heaviest drive you've had in quite a while too. But I think WD will once again pwn the consumer high-end with this one.

[Shorty]

Now the specs on those sound nice :D

Time to save :cool:

[lemonlime]

I'm still using my pair of 36G WD360 raptors. It will be nice to see some higher capacities, and NCQ etc..