- Thursday, 26 November 2009
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Headlines without verbs are like pigs without truffles - Mike Magee
Western Digital revamps hard drive line
WESTERN DIGITAL IS rebranding its lines while also launching a high-end enthusiast line. The new parts are Blue, Green and Black, with Black being the new black.
Blue represents the same old line, mainstream drives with nothing to really stand out from the crowd. This is the drive that goes into OEM PCs, or when your family member wants more storage space in their 'CPU' to hold more pictures from 'the intarnets'. Think value. Green is the new name for the low energy Greenpower line, sacrificing a little speed for a lot of power saving.
That brings us to the new Black line, a high-performance part meant for enthusiasts. It only comes in 750GB and 1TB capacities, basically the two top sizes on the market. Officially called the WD Caviar Black 750 GB (WD7501AALS) and 1TB (WD1001FALS), they will go on sale next week for $199 and $249 respectively.
What do you get for the few meagre dollars more that they cost? The most obvious one is a huge cache, 32MB to be exact. This goes with a new one to us, a second on-board controller for faster processing. Together, these are grouped into the "high performance electronics architecture" heading, it will be interesting to see what exactly this does, if WD releases a white paper on it.
They also have a "rock solid mechanical architecture" as well, and that consists of two items, shafts and heads. The motor shaft is secured at both ends, and WD calls this StableTrac(R)(TM)(C)(Otherthings) and the heads never touch the platter, called Notouch Ramp Loading Technology.
All of these things make a drive faster and purportedly more reliable, Black in WD newspeak. That new branding is a good thing though, no question there. It really clears up a somewhat muddled line in ways that even the average American consumer drone can grasp. ยต
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And what for the Raptors?
gold? platinum? pink with fluffy dice?

I think WD are doing such a great job being a smaller company, and seem to have a great way of differtiating their products, even if they arn't massively innovative, or different compared to the competition (except raptor).
Bah. HDD's last cry, before the comming of the new SSD. When these hit the market with a low price, in a year or so, HDD technology will become obsolete.
WD is actually the secound largest hard drive manufacturer in the world now, craig. They're not exactly small. Besides I think you [Inq] should notice that the green drives are the most quiet ones on the 3,5" selection according to SilentPCReview.
the only issue I have with raptors is their silly pairing with old technology 
they use a scsi coupled to a sata1 controller = bottleneck
the seagate 7200.11 that has 32mb cache in 750 and 1tb flavours kick the raptors but in all areas bar the random seek benchmark. and are half the price , and you get alot more space with seagate's drives

you get 150gb now for 280AU 
1tb 7200.11 for 248AU 
and equal performance, so weather or not they revamp the lines, make them look pretty there is no denying WD are behind the times, besides the power saving models, they really dont offer anything, bar a waste of my hard earned dosh, sorry WD maybe next year when you put sata 2 controllers on your raptors, and make them about 500gb then I would be willing to look a them, providing they are a decent cost as well.
I want a red one because they go faster
I want a red one because they go faster.
They released the velociraptor with 300 GB and SATA 2 controller a few months ago they are instock at my local stores... One of my raptors 150 GB so my raid is down i am considering buying two velociraptors... They only problem is that i don't need 300-600 GB of space... I only use them for windows, programs and a few games... 100 GB would do just fine...
"...WD calls this StableTrac(R)(TM)(C)(Otherthings) and the heads never touch the platter, called Notouch Ramp Loading Technology."
It's nice to know these are functioning as hard drives, not as a new technique for the lapping of hard drive platters.
I predict that it will take about 5 more years for mechanical HDDs to be obsolete.

You may think that SSD is already here...but this is just the tip of the iceberg...

SSD will finally replace HDD when the damn things have an equally long and reliable life expectancy at similar price points, with comparable storage space & more importantly, competitive pricing.

According to my latest isoteric readings into the ether of the nether worlds, I predict this process (SSD > HDD) to take 2-3 years.
Price:capacity parity between SSDs and HDDs in a year? Okay then.
I vote for pink with fuzzy dice! Ok, just fuzzy dice would do. 

I do like my Raptors.
I have a 1tb WD RE-2 GP myself and it really is the quietest drive I have ever come across and I see a lot as i work in tech support. I couldn't recomend this line more, especially to users with media boxes like shuttles.

The out performance of the Rapter drives has been noticed. and this is a shame. I imagen that platter dencity could have something to do with this aswell as other factors. I'm also not intirely convinced about the new drives with a laptop form factor hdd wrapped in a heatsink to bulk it upto a 3.5
There was always two levels, Kids Toys or Serious Tech Stuff. Think of it? Velocriaptor, its got neat Velo to mellow ones shame in spurting out Raptor, as thats name of game: mellow game,EATEMRAW.
Cool, yet only disc speed controlled data rate & that made heat, noise & vibration all side effects one expects from real raptor in Wild.
Other Choice, SCSI, of course with those hairy finger claws near port, who'd dare, it might be tyrano or something?
Certainly HDD will have two price folding in, it if not near three, just to BUM SSD cost/anaylsis freak out. especially movie storage device shines. 
SSD with be going to SCSI speeds as Ho Hum Low Power, No Noise, No heat, it gets LOTS faster than that, only too bad it cann't be cpu & storage. Maybe little geek (Sigmas)(TS)swirling about.
Western got 90 degreer up & now places with sata, with kicker in works. Ultie is compromised at 1.5 gb/s. not from speed break however.
So its sooner, i'd say,to sata2: as Ultie needs 3.0gb/s tronics.
Drashek
What about 6Gb/s SAS HDDs?
Will they be untouchable dinosaurs of questionable color too.
I don't have the alacrity to be a brisk race-ist.
iam voting for u for u.s. president
.
.
.
i can just imagine 
what ure state of the union address
would sound like
very nice

also
i like my raptors
but they are still bottlenecking 

bring on the new tech


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