WD confirms that more Raptors have become extinct

In the days before SSD, enthusiasts across the world saved up extra pennies to opt for Western Digital's neat take on the traditional hard drive. Like the other dinosaurs before them, Raptors ruled the world. Pretty soon, we might find ourselves hunting for them in museums. What's the current situation? KitGuru dresses like Jeff Golblum and heads off to search for historical documents.

Judging from the latest promotional material, Western Digital has decided that the future is based less on flesh tearing fangs and more on 24×7 reliability, reduced power consumption and noise reduction. It's a bit of a turnaround from the Raptor concept. A bit like a vegetarian deciding that the tastiest snack is, in fact, a medium rare steak.

The actual message about the latest round of Raptor removal, came from WD marketing genius Jim Mason. The models going missing are all 16MB cache versions of their 150GB and 300GB models – the kind of kit that gets its arse handed to it in head-to-head benchmark tests against even modest SSDs. No surprise there.

From what we can tell, it seems that WD will carry on making Raptor drives, but it was a little harder than we expected to get the inside track.

Searching the Western Digital site for more Raptor info, we hit a dead end.

KitGuru says: Let's hope that our screen grab is not a reflection on WD's ability to deliver 24×7 reliability. WD must be hoping that it's a Seagate drive or coding error. We miss the excitement of the Raptor launch days, but SSD is the Homo Sapien to IDE/SATAs Neanderthal. For the performance/enthusiast markets, dinosaurs no longer rule the world.

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