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.