Western Digital Corp. today announced the WD Caviar 120 GB Special Edition hard drive that uses an 8 MB buffer. According to Western Digital, the 8 MB buffer is the largest buffer available today in a 7,200 RPM desktop EIDE hard drive.
Western Digital said the WD Caviar 120 GB Special Edition 8 MB buffer hard drives provide a higher percentage of cache hits and significantly faster time to data than industry-standard 2 MB versions.
The larger buffer improves performance because there is a reduction in the number of physical accesses to the disk, allowing data to stream from the disk uninterrupted by mechanical operations. In addtion, Western Digital also said the 8 MB buffer can also offer an advantage in a server environment, where data typically is accessed across wider portions of the disks, as additional buffer resources, read and write commands are more quickly queued and served to the user.