Western Digital Velociraptor

Western Digital Velociraptor
Hard drive is incredibly fast, but has limited capacity

IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR the fastest desktop hard drive available-and don't mind a 300GB capacity and $299.99 price-you'll be very happy with Western Digital's 10,000rpm Velociraptor.
The Velociraptor is a 2.5-inch drive that comes with a special aluminium heat sink (called an IcePAK) that lets it fit inside a standard PC hard drive cage. The only drawback to this design is that the SATA connectors are in the middle of the unit, which prevents its use in external enclosures. The drive also does not support hot-swapping.
The Velociraptor ships with a STA II interface, which is capable of data transfer rates up to 3 gigabits (300 megabytes) per second. It also allows for a faster "burst" rate, speedily transferring cached data from its internal memory instead of from the physical platters. The package includes a 16MB cache, a single SATA II cable, and a 5-year warranty.
To test the drive's speed, we performed a basic 10GB read/write test, and we ran HD Tach 3.0 to check its seek time and sequential read performance. The Velociraptor displayed a super-fast seek time of 6.9ms-twice as fast as competing drives we've tested-and its HD Tach sequential read speed of 110MB/sec is almost double that of larger drives. It took only 2 minutes and 55 seconds to read and 3 minutes 10 seconds to write 10GB.
Better yet, the Velociraptor was largely inaudible throughout our testing, and it didn't feel warm to the touch, even after a few hours of fanless operation-J.N.
source: Computer Shopper September 2008.

www.westerndigital.com