Dell takes new hard drive for a spin

Dell, the Round Rock, Texas, PC maker, has begun offering Western Digital's Raptor hard drive as an option on its Precision workstations and Dimension consumer desktops, Western Digital said in a statement.

The WD Raptor is a high-performance hard drive, originally developed for servers. The drive generally stores less data than a comparably priced desktop drive, but can deliver it more quickly, boosting the performance of a desktop. The Raptor gets much of its extra performance by using internal disks that rotate at 10,000 revolutions per minute versus the 7,200rpm speed of a typical performance hard drive designed for desktops. Raptor currently offers 36GB of storage, and will offer 74GB this November, Western Digital said.