WD intros faster SATA drive

Western Digital (WD) on Monday announced its VelociRaptor Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drive. The new drive costs $299.99 and is Mac- and PC-compatible.

The VelociRaptor operates at 10,000 revolutions per minute (RPM) and sports 300GB of unformatted capacity. It comes equipped with 16MB of cache. WD says that it’s twice the capacity and a 35 percent performance increase over the previous generation of Raptor drives.

The VelociRaptor is a 2.5-inch mechanism but it’s enclosed in what WD calls the “IcePack,” a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay, and helps to keep the drive cool when installed in a high-performance PC desktop chassis.

Other features of the drive include Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF), which optimizes performance in vibration-prone environments, and SecurePark, which parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off.