A day earlier than it was expected five days ago, WD company unleashes its new hard disk drive called WD Raptor. More importantly, the novelty with 10 000rpm motor is not intended for customers, but for enterprises at this point, hence, none of your 10 000rpm dreams will come alive today – wait for another opportunity.

WD has not offered anything for servers and other enterprise solutions for years and their entrance into the market marks quite a lot of achievements made by the company recently. Furthermore, WD enters the market smartly: no SCSI and other expensive interfaces, just Serial ATA-150 that should not be slower or less reliable, but will be considerably cheaper. According to IDC, an industry analyst firm, average year-over-year storage growth between 2002 and 2006 will be 46%, with a gradual increase to about 60% in 2006. At the same time, storage industry experts, including IDC, expect average IT budgets to grow at relatively slow rates, single-digit percentages year-over-year. As a result, many organizations are looking for innovative ways to increase storage at minimal cost. That is where the Serial ATA-150 interface is aimed at! And WD hits the target first.

Expected to be shipping later this month, the WD Raptor hard drive is expected to sell for approximately 30% less than competing SCSI hard drives. Initially, the hard drive will be available in a 36GB capacity, thus, only one 36GB platter will be used – expect quite high performance from this device. In addition to its 5.2ms average seek time, 10 000rpm, 1.2 million hours MTBF and five-year warranty, data throughput is 150MB/s from the Serial ATA-150 interface.

Well, maybe some of you will even buy the babe for using in your home PC...