Western Digital Corp. has announced plans to make its WD Caviar 80 GB Special Edition hard drive available with an 8 MB cache.
According to the company, the WD Caviar 80 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. This allows data to stream from the disk uninterrupted by mechanical operations. With additional buffer resources, read and write commands are more quickly queued and served to the user.
Widespread availability of the WD Caviar 80 GB Special Edition hard drive is expected next month.