Western Digital Raptor
Adopting the SATA interface meant that it could be used easily on all modern motherboards with no separate host adapter card.
[1] On April 21, 2008, Western Digital announced the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA Raptor hard drive series.
The new drives, called WD VelociRaptor, feature 300 GB capacity and 2.5-inch platters enclosed in the IcePack, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink.
Western Digital claimed that the new drives were 35 percent faster than the previous generation Raptors.
Western Digital claims the new models are 15 percent faster than the previous generation of VelociRaptors.
It was the last generation of Raptor hard drives to be manufactured; Western Digital removed it from its product catalog in mid-2016, without any direct successor.
SCSI drives still outperformed the Raptor in multi-user scenarios, but for high-end home computers it fared very well.
For enthusiasts' systems, the Raptor also had the key advantages of low noise and temperature levels compared to similarly performing drives.
WD360GD Raptors with the Marvell 88i8030-TBC PATA to SATA bridge chip, such as WD360GD-00FNA0 (December 2003) and earlier, are limited to UDMA 5 transfers.
The second generation Raptor was introduced in early 2004, featuring two platters for 74 GB of storage space.
Command queuing resulted in a notable increase in the WD740GD's multi-user performance—a key discipline where its predecessor failed compared to SCSI drives.
Unfortunately one of the major enhancements of WD740ADFD, the NCQ, is implemented so badly in the WD740ADFD-00NLR1 that it has been added to the Linux libata drive blacklist.
It has identical specifications to the standard Raptor,[9] but it has the addition of a clear polycarbonate window in the drive cover, making the movements of the disks and magnetic heads visible.
[11] As well as increasing the capacity to 300 GB (split over two 150 GB platters), the form factor is as follows: Earlier GLFS models have been criticised for being incompatible with 3.5-inch SATA hot swap bays due to the position of the connectors; however, a new revision (HLFS models) has been released which remedies this problem.
Western Digital later released a 2.5-inch Velociraptor (BLFS models) which is nearly identical to the 3.5-inch version, but without the IcePack heat sink.
A severe issue with the fourth generation of raptor drives was faulty firmware, which caused the drive to report TLER timeouts after roughly 50 days of continuous operation (precisely 49.71 days counted in milliseconds, which corresponds to the overflow of a 32-bit number).
Standard laptop hard drives typically only require +5 V. The sixth-generation Raptor (or third-generation VelociRaptor) was announced by Western Digital in April 2012.
