Western Digital has bumped up the 10,000 RPM drives with a solution for those wanting larger capacity on the traditionally small capacity storage area. with many drives on the market now in the 1TB range at a reasonable cost, it makes sense to take a look at bumping up your internal and external storage however these SATA drives generally spin at 7200RPM. This is a jump over the old 5400RPM technology in the past and combined with large cache size, now at a standard 16MB cache, the speeds to access your data and write to the drives has significantly increased.
I have always been a fan of 10,000RPM technology however because of the higer spin rate on the platters, more heat is generated and thus the size has usually been reserved to a max of 160GB. The announcement this morning from Western Digital almost doubles the capacity and seems to focus it’s attention on the gaming market with the VelociRaptor. The 10,000RPM drive with a 16MB Cache features a capcity of 300GB. The drive itself is a 2.5inch form factor however it is wrapped by what Western Digital calls the IcePack taking it to a 3.5 inch factor, commen with most internal drives today.
Alienware will have the VelociRaptor in the ALX Desktop by the end of the month of April and 
will also sell direct the drives through its website. The WD3000GLFS will also be available through the WD store at http://www.shopwd.com/ The cost for the drive will be around $299 which should satisfy most performance seekers for Gaming, Digital Audio and Video Editing and overall speed of your data read and writes. For more info, check out the WD Website
