Western Digital today announced the addition of its 200 GB capacity “Drivezilla” hard drives to its Caviar Special Edition product family. Western Digital’s Special Edition hard drives feature an 8 MB cache size – four times larger than the industry standard 2 MB cache size. The Company’s 200 GB capacity WD Caviar 7,200 RPM hard drives, nicknamed “Drivezilla,” are the largest IDE and fastest spinning desktop hard drives currently shipping in the industry. Caviar drives have proved to be popular in systems of all types including servers and NAS devices.
“By offering a new model with 6 MB of extra cache, Western Digital has made one of the world’s fastest desktop ATA storage devices even faster,” said Richard E. Rutledge, vice president of marketing for Western Digital.
The additional cache size, in the Special Edition hard drives, increases overall system performance under most benchmarks and real world situations — an ideal choice for computing needs that range from top-of-the-line desktops and work stations to high-end IDE applications such as entry-level enterprise servers. Western Digital Special Edition hard drives are available in capacities of 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, 180 and 200 GB.
The 8 MB buffer on the WD Caviar Special Edition 200 GB 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. End-user performance is enhanced through increased speed in gaming; faster music and video downloads; faster storage and retrieval of digital photos. This allows data to stream from the disk uninterrupted by mechanical operations.
The 8 MB buffer can also offer an advantage in a server and NAS environments, where data typically is accessed across wider portions of the disks. With additional buffer resources, read and write commands are more quickly queued and served to the user.
