Western Digital working on 20,000 RPM Raptor

[Gwarsbane]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06...0-rpm-raptor/1

Western Digital working on 20,000 RPM Raptor
Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 6th June 2008

According to several sources close to the hard drive industry, Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive to combat the increasing pressure from SSD manufacturers.

We have spoken to a lot of people out here in Taipei about this industry’s direction and one thing is becoming clear: SSDs are going to be affordable in the next 12 to 18 months.

Because of this, hard drive manufacturers are starting to get a little worried about what marketshare SSDs might eventually take away from them—especially where performance is more of a concern than storage capacity.

And that’s exactly what Western Digital’s Raptor line is all about.

The new drive will be very similar to the recently-released VelociRaptor, in that it’ll be a 2.5in drive with a custom 3.5in housing built around it. Details are incredibly light at this stage, given that the product is still in development, and we don’t even have a release timeframe at the moment.

However, our sources said that the drive will be ‘silent’ – that’s the last thing I would have expected from a drive with platters spinning at 20,000 RPM. Western Digital is apparently working on silencing the beast by improving the housing technology, which will now not just act as a heatsink, but also as a noise cancelling device. We’d also hope that the drive enclosure has some vibration dampening technology as well, because that’s also likely to be a problem given the high spindle speeds.

[Innoc]

I could be completely wrong but I think Western Digital is fighting the inevitable. Frankly I think they went the wrong way with the focus of the Raptor line as well...but perhaps that was more a limitation of their developed technology and not a marketing strategy...

[mervaka]

they're silly not to jump on the SSD bandwagon, but pending release date, they could sell a few of these!

[Ricey]

Originally Posted by mervaka

they're silly not to jump on the SSD bandwagon, but pending release date, they could sell a few of these!

It's still gonna be a while till SSD is at an affordable and reasonable price. While I love my SSD drive, it still has problems. So, gogo 20,000RPM HDD.

[KubeDawg]

Yeah the current technology is probably already there, and the reasearch and dev has probably been in the works for some time now as far as this goes, so instead of jumping the SSD bandwagon and losing all that cashola, I'm not surprised to see this move by them, and I'm sure some enthusiasts will take this route.