Western Digital today announced its new Raptor HDDs with doubled capacity. The new hard disk drives inherited all advantages of the original Raptor series announced earlier this year, incuding Serial ATA-150 interconection and 10 000rpm motors.

The new-generation WD Raptor drives offer 74GB and performance-boosting Ultra/150 Command Queuing (Ultra/150 CQ) technology, as well as Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward (RAFF) technology. The features are said to boost performance of the drives towards the level offered by SCSI devices.

Western Digital's Ultra/150 CQ technology optimizes the sequence of data transfers to the hard drive from the host, providing increased data transfer efficiency, which results in higher performance and throughput for enterprise applications. The issuance and completion of one command may be simultaneous with the data transfer of another command, thus minimizing rotational and drive seek latency.

The new WD Raptor drives employ RAFF technology to maintain hard drive performance in high vibration environments through adaptive compensation of the servo system. WD Raptor 74GB drive utilizes Fluid Dynamic Bearings (FDB) to reduce noise and increase long-term reliability.

WD Raptor drives are designed to deliver enterprise-class specifications with 1.2 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), 10000rpm, 4.5ms average seek time, and a five-year warranty.

The company expects to begin shipments of the new WD Raptor drives with Ultra/150 CQ in November of this year. Pricing was not touched upon at press time.