Western Digital have done what a good deal of us have been hoping they'd do for a while. They've released 2 new versions of the Raptor, the Raptor WD1500AD for servers and the Raptor WD1500AH for gamers. Both drives have 150GB storage capacity, 16MB cache, are SATA 2 (300MB/s) and have Native Command Queuing (NCQ) support. Noise and seek times are the same as the older drives (4.6ms seek time and about 32 db idle noise IIRC)
It's expected the Raptor WD1500 will be as fast as the current generation of 10,000 RPM SCSI and SAS hard disks, with sustained transfer rates of minimum 85MB/s.
The difference between AD and the AH is that the latter features support for Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER). Information here
Apparently some European webshops have them in already going for about 320 Euros, which is double the price of the current drive.
I am now salivating at the thought of my next rig and am definitely investing in some hard drive coolers, these things are gonna be the bollocks!
