Here’s an external storage system that will make some users go ga-ga with the speed it offers.
In the Velociraptor Duo, Western Digital (WD) has thrown in two Velociraptors, the fastest desktop hard drives around running at 10,000 revolutions per minute (rpm). This is hooked up to your computer via a Thunderbolt link that is several times faster than what you get on USB.
The promise from WD? Solid state drive-like performance for a niche market that includes graphics designers and perhaps regular users with deep pockets.
The company claims the drive can transfer 22GB worth of movies in less than 65 seconds, 2,000 5MB pictures in less than 33 seconds and over 500 5MB songs in less than 8 seconds. That’s pretty fast, even when compared with SSDs.
But who needs it? Possibly those in the creative fields, who use their Macs to create and edit large video files. SSDs are great for speed, but for now, they are still very expensive when it comes to high capacity drives.
The 2TB version of the Velociraptor Duo, made up of two 1TB Velociraptors, goes for a costly S$1,299, but consider the cost of four 512GB SSDs (making up about 2TB). That’s more than S$600 each, bringing the cost to over S$2,400, twice as much.
With the speed provided by the Velociraptor Duo, designers can directly work on the files stored on the external drive. Slower drives could end up slowing things down every time a user tries to save his work on a disk.
Right now, this Thunderbolt storage system is aimed at Mac users, though it’s known to work with Windows PCs with Thunderbolt-enabled motherboards.
The Velociraptor Duo, like most dual-drive systems, can be run in the speedy RAID 0 mode, the safety-first but slower RAID 1 mirroring option or as JBOD (just a bunch of disks).
If you want to run it at SSD-like speeds, then you’d have to go with RAID 0. This means, however, that if one of the two drives fails, your data is gone. So, a backup is definitely necessary.
