Western Digital, a leading maker of hard disk drives (HDDs) on Wednesday unveiled a version of its WD VelociRaptor hard drive designed for enterprise and business customers. The novelty should bring performance increases to those customers, who have been using original WD Raptor drives.

WD VelociRaptor features 300GB capacity, 10 000rpm rotational speed, 16MB cache, 4.2ms read seek time, 4.7ms write seek time and average latency of 3ms, an improvement over the model aimed at enthusiasts, which has average latency time of 5.5ms. The VelociRaptor hard drive is designed for Serial ATA-300 interface and supports such enhancements as NCQ technology.

Business-oriented WD VelociRaptor model WD3000BLFS comes without IcePack heatsink that is featured on enthusiast oriented WD VelociRaptor model WD3000GLFS, thus, it suits well for integration into 1U or 2U servers.

“In the server market, demand for high performance drives continues to shift from the 3.5” form factor to the enterprise 2.5” form factor. The new 2.5” WD VelociRaptor drive is the only drive available that can offer server customers the flexibility of integrating SATA technology while benefiting from server-class performance and reliability,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD’s enterprise storage solutions business unit.

WD VelociRaptor 2.5-inch hard drives (model WD3000BLFS) are under evaluation with OEM customers and will be available through select commercial distributors by the end of the month.

“WD is bringing to enterprise customers what PC enthusiasts already appreciate about the WD VelociRaptor: a combination of high performance and high capacity for hard drive storage. WD’s new WD VelociRaptor, designed specifically for the enterprise in an energy efficient 2.5” form factor, gives system OEMs and end users a new storage option to consider to meet growing storage requirements,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives.