New Velociraptors from Western Digital

Although for increasing data transfer speeds people are migrating from mechanical hard drives to solid state drives Western Digital is still pursuing the “VelociRaptor” series because the price per GB is generally a lot cheaper than for solid state drives, so they are often a more viable option for the consumer.

In 2010 Western Digital released the SATA 6GB/s versions of the Velociraptors for models with 600 and 450GB of storage, they also doubled the cache from 16MB to 32MB. However the smaller models of 300GB and 150GB were not updated and remained still only at SATA 3GB/s with the 16MB of cache. So the newly released Velociraptors will be SATA 6GB/s with 32MB of cache in 150GB and 300GB capacities.

They will be 20-25% more expensive than the SATA 3GB/s equivalents, expect them to be listed at most retailers/e-tailers pretty soon. Prices will be around 144 Euros for the 300GB version and 120 euros for the 150GB version. A 300GB Intel 520 Series SSD costs about 370 Euros, which is 1.23 Euros per GB whereas the velociraptor is 0.48 Euros per GB around a third of the price so expect the Velociraptors to be quite popular among the computer enthusiasts.