Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced that it is enhancing the throughput, performance and capacity of its popular enterprise-class Serial ATA (SATA) 10,000 RPM WD Raptor hard drives, offering enterprise customers an increasingly compelling reason to reduce the cost of their storage. The next-generation WD Raptor drives offer 74 GB and performance-boosting Ultra/150 Command Queuing (Ultra/150 CQ) technology, as well as Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward (RAFF) technology -- all at significantly less cost than comparable SCSI drives -- and establish Western Digital with the broadest SATA lineup for enterprise applications. The company expects to begin shipment of the new WD Raptor drives with Ultra/150 CQ in November of this year.
Enterprise storage industry vendors have quickly embraced SATA hard drives as a reliable and cost-effective choice for servers and storage systems, for which WD Raptor offers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives available today. The next-generation WD Raptor model will be demonstrated with technology partners Marvell (Booth No. 313), Promise (Booth No. 337) and Silicon Image (Booth No. 436) at the Intel Developer Forum, beginning tomorrow in San Jose, Calif.