Western Digital will soon announce their new WD VelociRaptor VR200M which is actually an enterprise drive playing a role of a prosumer/consumer product. This drive will feature sizes ranging from 150GB up to 600GB with 32MB of cache utilizing the SATA 6G interface, which should make these drives great for RAID 0. They will also come in the 2.5″ formfactor, similar to the previous VelociRaptor drives and will also come with the IcePack cooler which mounts these drives into a 3.5″ formfactor which will enable easy mounting into 3.5″ HDD bays for consumer and enterprise users. WD also stresses that they do not condone the use of these drives in notebooks, probably because of the fact that these are indeed 2.5″ 10,000 RPM HDDs and they are bound to get hot enough to cause serious issues for themselves as well as other components within the notebook. Although, we would be very excited if they could find a reliable way to put these drives into notebooks, as that would give notebook users more choice when thinking about replacing their stock HDDs.
Western Digital claims that these drives are 15% faster than the previous generation and that they will also beat out all other competitors in the field, which we believe may have some traction considering the fact that our Seagate XT 2TB HDDs had sustained read speeds of about 140 MB/s. Granted, those drives utilize 500GB platters as opposed to the 200GB ones in the VR200M.
These drives will also feature a 3ms average latency, which is significantly better than most if not all physical hard disk drives out there. Western Digital also claims a few new features including NoTouch ramp load technology which means that the recording head on the drive never physically touches the disk media which should result in less wear to the recording head as well as the media. They also included Pre-Emptive Wear Leveling or PWL which is designed to optimize the drive’s writes for high rates of incoming commands.
The final feature they have added to this drive, which is specifically targeted towards the enterprise space is RAFF or Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward. RAFF basically optimizes the operation of the drive for vibration-prone conditions where there are many drives that are in the same enclosure and all of them are vibrating which can affect the performance of physical drives like HDDs.
In addition to adding new features, the new VelociRaptor VR200M is also RoHS compliant and now features a “halogen free” design. To be quite honest, we’re not sure why Western Digital put halogen free in quotations, but it sounds like quite a good thing either way. We look forward to getting these and comparing them against our Seagate 15K RPM drives as well as some of our 2TB XTs and maybe even some SSDs. Also, if Western Digital had actually thought of this as a marketing point, they could have called these drives the “VROOM” Drives considering how close their part number fits with the word and the fact that they claim these to be the fastest HDDs in the land. In any case, fastest SATA drives.
Original Author: Anshel Sag
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