You read that right. Bit-tech has it from "several sources close to the hard drive industry" that Western Digital is working on a 20,000RPM followup to its new 10,000RPM VelociRaptor performance champ. Same 2.5-inch format, same 3.5-inch housing only now designed to better cancel out the drive's noise. The idea is to take on SSDs in terms of performance while offering substantially greater capacity as flash memory prices continue to fall. We'll just have to pretend that power consumption, vibration, and ruggedness aren't a concern.

With the holidays fast approaching and both Leopard's Time Machine and Windows Home Server loosed upon your desktop, we know what you're asking the Santa man for: a new 7200rpm 1TB hard drive. The question is, which one to purchase: Hitachi, Seagate, or Western Digital. Well, according to a review over at Hot Hardware, it doesn't matter, much. Those looking for the best price can find the WD Caviar GP on-line for about $0.27 per GB compared to the Hitachi's $0.31 per GB price. Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 tops the list at $0.33 per GB. That's a big jump in heat, noise, and price when compared to the $0.19 per GB required for a 7200rpm 500GB drive. However, if mass capacity is your priority and available slots are limited, then a 1TB disk will do you fine.

Lockheed's shiny new F-22 Raptor stealth fighters may have owned a few war games, but crossing the International Date Line left them as helpless as a carrot in a rabbit trap, with multiple system crashes causing an emergency detour en route from Hawaii to Okinawa, Japan. Communication, fuel subsystems, and navigation systems were rendered useless and repeated "reboots" were of no help. Luckily, the fleet had clear skies and refueling tankers to guide them back to Hawaii. If they had separated from the tankers, "they would have turned around and probably could have found the Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there could have been real trouble," states Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. The voyage suffered a two-day delay on account of the system failures -- "a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes." What should have been a showy parade of $125+ million super fighters quickly turned to disaster for Lockheed who would've had a lot of explaining to do, had this happened during combat.

[Via Slashdot]