Hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturer Western Digital Corp. said Tuesday it was ready to ship its new Raptor hard drive with increased capacity of 150GB and enlarged cache of 16MB. While the drive is primarily designed for enterprise applications, such storage solutions are often used by enthusiasts seeking for highest performance possible.

As reported earlier, the new drive boasts with 150GB capacity, 10 000rpm rotational speed, 16MB cache, 4.6ms read seek time, 5.2ms write seek time and average latency of 2.99ms. For the first time WD Raptor 150GB uses two platters with 80GB capacity (formatted at 75GB) instead of 40GB (formatted as 37GB) platters that were used for Raptor 36GB and Raptor 74GB models.

The new Raptor drive also offers best-in-class random I/O performance with native command queuing (NCQ), which increases performance by intelligently ordering multiple simultaneous read and write commands, which is common in demanding, multi-user workloads such as servers.

The enterprise-class mechanical and electronics platform of WD Raptor is designed to meet the 24x7 demands of the enterprise environment. WD Raptor is reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments and is backed by a five-year warranty.

WD Raptor 150GB (model WD1500ADFD) hard drives are currently shipping in volume. Estimated retail pricing for WD Raptor is $299.99.