Although solid state drives are all the rage nowadays, Western Digital is still peddling its lighting fast 10,000rpm Velociraptor series and it has now refreshed its line up with two revamped drives.

Last year WD introduced its fifth generation Velociraptor drives, with native SATA 6Gbps support and 32MB of cache. However, the changes were limited to 450GB and 600GB drives, while 300GB and 150GB units were stuck with the SATA II interface and 16MB of cache.

Now these small drives are also getting generation 5 goodies and several retailers are already listing them. They are about 20 percent pricier than their predecessors, with prices starting at about €120 and €144 for the 150GB and 300GB models respectively. Pricey? Maybe, but this is still quite a bit cheaper than SSD drives of comparable capacities, which tend to cost two to three times more per gigabyte.