WD's Raptor Still Stands Alone
by: Sal Cangeloso
Over two years ago Western Digital announced the arrival of the first ever 10,000 RPM serial ATA hard drive, the Raptor. Despite having a capacity of just 37GB, the WD360GD was an immediate hit with performance enthusiasts and high-end system builders. The rotational speed of the drive allowed for fast read/write speeds as well as very quick access times. Within days of its release the industry was buzzing with excitement and people were putting their new Raptor's in RAID 0 arrays for the speed and capacity benefits.
It is no surprise that the popularity of the Raptor has grown and it still finds its way into many consumer's dream systems. The 37GB Raptor was followed up with a 74GB model and just recently a 150GB one, both of which have made the drive a more versatile, albeit expensive, tool. What is surprising is that other companies have not followed suit and offered a 10,000 RPM SATA drive of their own. In the computer industry innovations are almost always countered by rivals within a matter of weeks, if not days. This time neither the large competitors, like Seagate and Maxtor (now the same company) nor smaller players, like Samsung, Fujitsu, or Hitachi, have delivered a 10K SATA drive of their own.
Despite all the advances in the storage industry lately, the changes to the average desktop drive have been limited. Aside from the move to SATA (from IDE connections) some performance drives feature 16MB caches (instead of 8MB or 2MB) and others have started to included native command queuing (NCQ), but past these the changes have been limited. The average hard drive has gotten much larger than it was a few years ago; this upgrade in capacity is certainly the most significant change.
It is hard to say exactly why there are not more 10K SATA drives on the market but there are more than a few possibilities why this it the case. It is very unlikely that technical limitations are preventing companies from putting out a drive, though producing reliable drives at higher RPM levels can be problematic. A more likely reason is that the high-performance consumer sector is one which is relatively small and fickle, so as unlikely as it seems, it may not be worth it for companies to enter the foray.