Western Digital’s first released its Raptor in 2003 and was significant in a number of ways. For a start it was its first SATA hard drive. However WD did something far more interesting than taking one of its Caviar drives and simply nailing on a SATA interface. Instead, it built a drive with a 10,000rpm spindle speed offering a superior data transfer speed than conventional 7,200rpm ATA100 drives thanks to lower rotational latency.
However, one downside of the high rotational speed meant that the single platter had to be three inches in diameter rather than the usual three and a half inches. The consequence of this was that that the capacity was very low at only 36.7GB, hence the model name WD360. PC desktop drives usually have capacities that go up in steps of 10GB so the Raptor appeared to have a very strange capacity, but WD had a trick up its sleeve.
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Feb 9, 2006, 07:47 AM
