Western Digital 20,000 RPM Raptor to compete with SSDs

Western Digital is working on a new product to combat solid state disks, Bit Tech heard at Computex that the hard drive maker is developing a new 20,000 RPM Raptor HDD. These 20K RPM drives should be really fast and they will compete against solid state disks in applications were performance matters and not some of the other things SSD are better in like power consumption and reliability.

The new drive will be very similar to the recently-released VelociRaptor, in that it’ll be a 2.5in drive with a custom 3.5in housing built around it. Details are incredibly light at this stage, given that the product is still in development, and we don’t even have a release timeframe at the moment.

However, our sources said that the drive will be ‘silent’ – that’s the last thing I would have expected from a drive with platters spinning at 20,000 RPM. Western Digital is apparently working on silencing the beast by improving the housing technology, which will now not just act as a heatsink, but also as a noise cancelling device. We’d also hope that the drive enclosure has some vibration dampening technology as well, because that’s also likely to be a problem given the high spindle speeds.

The performance of these drives should be pretty impressive but eventually the price of solid state disks will come down and even 20K RPM technology won't be able to save the HDD.