One of the biggest advantages of HDDs is their price, especially when compared to larger SSDs at the moment. When it comes to dollar per Gigabyte nothing can beat it. But it comes with a price, HDDs are rather slow, make noise and consume quite an amount of power. SSDs are superfast, make no noise at all and consume less power, but are much pricier. So, what if you could get a HDD with the speed of SSD? WD has issued a press release today in which it announces that their new My Book VelociRaptor Duo dual drive storage system got, "a boost in performance that delivers solid state drive (SSD) -like data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/s for greater work-flow productivity."
Sounds interesting, so let's have a look on how that would be achieved. The duo part of the product name gives it away. There are two HDDs in the My Book VelociRaptor Duo, and they can be configured to work in either a RAID 0 or RAID 1. In RAID 0 data is spread over two drives benefiting from the transfer rates of two discs and in RAID 1 the data is redundantly stored on both discs. The SSD-like performance will only be possible in RAID 0 which has the disadvantage that if one of the drives fails, you'll have data corruption.
Still RAID 0 alone would probably not be sufficient to achieve SSD-like performance, here an another technology comes around the corner; Thunderbolt. This technology developed by Intel and available on many Apple devices has a very high transfer rate which allows fast transfer of the data from the HDD to the PC. The combination of RAID 0 and Thundershould be responsible for the SSD-like performance, however the price advantage of WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo dual-drive storage system is pretty much gone at a whopping $899.99 MSRP USD.
