Western Digital’s Raptor Makes it to Retail

by Anton Shilov
04/04/2003 | 06:36 AM

Western Digital’s Serial ATA-150 Hard Disk Drive for servers and workstation unveiled in early February has by now reached retail channels all around the world, as I found out today.

The WD Raptor hard disk drive is available in a 36GB capacity at this time. Average seek time of the HDD is 5.2ms,  it features 10 000rpm motor and boasts with 1.2 million hours MTBF as well as five-year warranty. With 8MB buffer and faster motor, the product promises to be a very fast one; for instance, Western Digital declares internal transfer speed of up to 102MB/s.

In Japan 36GB WD Raptor HDDs are sold for about $180, while in the USA such products cost starting from $165. It is definitely quite a high price for a desktop HDD, however, it is considerably cheaper compared to SCSI drives for servers and workstations.