We’re still very much in a storage transitionary period here, what with platter-based HDDs being so big and affordable and SSDs creeping up on them both in size and performance-wise. Western Digital isn’t giving up on the HDD yet — they think there’s still a little bite left in that old hound. But they’re giving it a boost.

WD is hard at work on a freaky new hard drive, a derivative of its Velociraptor line, except these new ones will be spinning at a hot 20,000RPM, hopefully to bring their read/write speeds in line with SSDs. And they’re supposed to be silent. The idea is that it’s a 2.5″ drive in a 3.5″ enclosure, so they can put extra shock and sound dampeners in there. No one really knows much about these things, but we’ll keep you updated.