Western Digital announced today that it is now shipping WD VelociRaptor 450GB and 600GB hard drives. The 10,000 RPM hard drives are designed for blade servers, high performance PC, Mac computers, professional workstations, as well as 1U and 2U rack servers. The new WD VelociRaptor hard drive now comes packed with twice the capacity and up to 15 percent performance increase over previous generation.

The new drives support SATA 6 Gb/s interface and come with 32MB cache. The drives are designed for durability under high performance requirements in 24 x 7 work environment. They come in 2.5-inch enterprise form factor and 3.5-inch IcePack enclosure that has built-in heat sink.

WD VelociRaptor (model WD4500HLHX and WD6000HLHX – 3.5-inch version with IcePack) hard drives are available now at select distributors and resellers. WD VelociRaptor 2.5-inch hard drives (model WD4500BLHX and WD6000BLHX) are under evaluation with OEM customers and will be available through select commercial distributors within this quarter. The WD VelociRaptor 450 GB (model WD4500HLHX) is $299 USD and the 600 GB (model WD6000HLHX) is $329 USD.

You can get more information about the new drives on Western Digital’s website.