New WD Raptor on the Horizon?

Hardware sites are buzzing today with news that Western
Digital plans to announce a new version of its 10,000RPM Raptor Hard Drives in
the new year. Two new flavors of Raptor are slated to be released one for
server based use and the other for high-end game systems, each featuring a much
improved capacity of 150GB. Rumored features of the WD1500AD
(Server) and WD1500AH (Gamer) versions include:

SATA-II
Capabilities w/ NCQ

16MB
Cache

4.5ms
Seek Time

1.2
million hours MTBF

All this storage and speed comes with a fairly hefty price tag.
One vendor in

Europe is listing the new server
variant at just over $375 American. No official word from Western
Digital yet, but the leaked reports claim that the drives will be announced very
early on in 2006.

View: WD1500AD/AH Spec Sheet