From Trusted Reviews:

Western Digital's (WD) Raptor line of performance hard drives are the stuff of legend. They combine the high spindle speed and performance of more expensive server hard drives with the cheap, simple, and consumer centric SATA connection of home user systems in a combination that enthusiasts have lapped up. The first drives were a revelation at the time of their release and they still have a dedicated fan base to this day. Quite simply, if speed rather than capacity was your motivating factor, and you didn't want to get into the expensive and complicated world of SCSI, a Raptor was the way to go.

Now, the only drawback with Raptors has been their capacity, or their lack thereof. The first Raptor was released in 2003 when the largest hard drives were hitting 200GB+. The Raptor WD360, though, was a piffling 37GB. When a revised version, the WD740, was released in 2004 it still only doubled the capacity to 74GB and a further revision, the WD1500 (or Raptor X), in 2006 again doubled this to 150GB - but by this point other hard drives were hitting 500GB+. Now, a further two years on with hard drive capacities reaching over 1TB and SSDs starting to nip at the Raptor's rapidly aging heels, Western Digital has finally released a new Raptor; the WD3000, or VelociRaptor - a nice name I'm sure you'll agree.

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