The company estimates four Raptor drives would have a street price of $160 each; add a Serial ATA RAID card from 3ware Inc. at $399, for a total of $1,039 -- or $7.21 per GByte. By comparison, four SCSI drives at $210 plus a $599 SCSI RAID controller would cost $1,439 for the same amount of storage, or $10.00 per GByte.
Western Digital is particularly interested in developing the market for enterprise Serial ATA drives because it has no existing SCSI or Fibre Channel business. It sees a major opportunity to rip into competitors that do, including Seagate Technology Inc. (NYSE: STX), Hitachi Ltd. (NYSE: HIT; Paris: PHA), and Maxtor Corp. (NYSE: MXO).
"Our competitors, once they get over the shock to their business models, will have to adopt Serial ATA," Wilkins says. "Every one of our competitors has a SCSI business, so they'll want to protect that... but they'll eventually have to eat their own babies." [Ed. note: Enchanting image.]
Western Digital is so sure that it is on the cusp of an "inflection point" in the enterprise drive market that it named the drive Raptor to evoke smaller, more cunning creatures that outwitted and outmaneuvered the larger SCSI dinosaurs.
"We're going to change the industry," Wilkins says. "We're going to look back on this in a few years and say, 'This is when something really big happened.' "
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