How are Western Digital Velociraptor Drives Still so Expensive?

[DemonDragonJ]

I very much would like to purchase this hard drive here, because I would like to experience its superior performance over this drive, the one that I currently have, but I simply cannot justify paying nearly four times the price for a 10,000 RPM hard drive over a 7,200 RPM drive.

Therefore, I wonder how the 10,000 RPM drive can still be so expensive, especially with solid-state drives decreasing in price and increasing in capacities. Although solid-state drives are still more expensive, per gigabyte, than either 7,200 RPM or even 10,000 RPM hard drives, some serious users would gladly pay the additional price for the (ideally) vastly superior performance of the solid-state drives. Therefore, in my mind, as the prices of solid-state drives continue to decrease, the 10,000 RPM hard drives will not be able to compete with them, unless their prices decrease nearly as much as the prices of 7,200 RPM drives have.

What does everyone else here have to say? Can you offer any insight into this situation? I eagerly await your responses.

[x88x]

Well, they offer a middle ground in performance between 7200RPM HDDs and SSDs as well as a corresponding middle ground between the two. Besides, they're still cheaper than 10k SAS drives.

[TheMainMan]

Most of the people I know use the Raptor drives for the OS and have a high capacity 7200 rpm drive for storage. The 150 GB Raptor, which is far larger than the 100GB SSD array I run for my OS, would be sufficient for most people and Newegg lists it for $120. Toss in a 2TB WD Green drive and you have spent less money overall than buying a 600GB Raptor. In my experience, unless you are video editing in a production environment most people won't need the speed AND capacity of the 600GB Raptor.

[Airbozo]

The main target audience for those drives is not the normal consumer, rather the power users and data centers who buy a lot of them and cannot justify the move to SSD for space and money reasons. Hell we even sell a boat load of the 15000 rpm drives.

[DemonDragonJ]

Since I mentioned both Western Digital and solid-state drives in the same topic, I have another question. Western Digital is, from that I have observed, one of the foremost manufacturers of hard drives, but they have been terribly slow to adopt solid-state technology. Why is that? They must know that if they do not place an emphasis on solid-state drives in the way that other companies have, they shall lose money and revenue as mechanical hard drives become obsolete, so I do not understand why they have not put more effort into marketing their own solid-state drives.

[diluzio91]

Honestly? Because they aren't tooled for ssd's. At least that's my guess. Look at companies that make hard drives, WD, Seagate, Maxtor. Now look at the companies making SSD's, OCZ, Gskill, Corsair, Patriot ect...

Right now the people who are pumping out ssd's are the ram companies, because the ssd is much closer to ram than it is to a mechanical drive.

[TheMainMan]

In addition to that, there is also the fact that a very large part of the mechanical HDD market resides with business and enterprise applications. SSDs still aren't close to replacing mechanical drives in most of those applications due to durability.

[DemonDragonJ]

Honestly? Because they aren't tooled for ssd's. At least that's my guess. Look at companies that make hard drives, WD, Seagate, Maxtor. Now look at the companies making SSD's, OCZ, Gskill, Corsair, Patriot ect...

Right now the people who are pumping out ssd's are the ram companies, because the ssd is much closer to ram than it is to a mechanical drive.

In addition to that, there is also the fact that a very large part of the mechanical HDD market resides with business and enterprise applications. SSDs still aren't close to replacing mechanical drives in most of those applications due to durability.

Yes, both of those explanations do make sense to me, but I definitely believe that that situation may change as time passes and solid-state technology advances.

[xr4man]

you also have to look at cost, i think it will be a long time before you have 3 TB ssds for less than $200.

so, for storage the platter drives will reign supreme for a long time, until they become not cost effective.

[confusis]

Supply and demand will also play a huge part in pricing. Making and selling 10k units vs 100k units will always have a big price/unit cost difference.