Gizmodo Australia » raptor

A Picture Is Worth About $US138 Million

Jack Loftus — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0000

The quick lens of U.S. Navy sonar technician Ronald Dejarnett was able to capture this Air Force F-22 going supersonic over the Gulf of Alaska as the pilot did his best Top Gun flyby impression. [U.S. Navy]

Western Digital Researching 20,000RPM Hard Disk to Fight Solid State Drives

Gizmodo US Edition — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:59:00 +0000

According to blog Bit-Tech.net, sources in the hard drive industry say that Western Digital (maker of the old world’s fastest hard drive) “is working on a 20,000RPM Raptor hard drive to combat” Solid State Drives, since these are going to “be affordable in the next 12 or 18 months.” The new Raptor will be a 2.5-inch drive inside a 3.5-inch custom box designed to make it “silent,” since a 20,000RPM HD could probably make your ears bleed after a few minutes at fulll speed. But can a mechanical drive compete against solid state?

Even while the new 20,000RPM Raptor could be engineered to be ultra-fast and more or less silent at the same time, the challenges for a mechanical design are too many to ignore. Mainly, there’s is the issue of power consumption: this rotation speed will require a lot of extra energy compared to normal drives, which is a bad spot in a market that is claiming for greener technology, and is moving away from the desktop into the mobile space, where power consumption is a make or break issue. The reliability of such a complex mechanical design would be another potential problem.

Everything to try to match Solid State Drives, which also will keep evolving, getting faster and even more efficient down the line. [Bit-Tech]

F-22 Raptor Airframes Falling Apart Due to Bad Glue

Jesus Diaz — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:30:13 +0000

According to a just-released Air Combat Command report, 30 of the F-22A Raptors delivered by Lockheed Martin use “inadequate adhesive” in their airframes. That means two things in plain language: bad glue; and big trouble.

The report comes after investigators finished looking into an accident that happened last November. Part of the airframe of a F-22A fell off into the engine intake, causing a whopping US$1.2 million of damage.

And, while we understand that machines so amazingly complex will always have flaws that need to be ironed out, let’s hope they used SuperGlue with the F-35 Lightning II. Or gum. [The Dew Line]