The storage capacity and performance of hard drives used by desktop computers is growing all the time. Capacity isn’t the only thing to consider with a hard drive; the read/ write performance and cache size comes into play as well.
Western Digital has introduced a new Caviar Black line of hard drives that is available in both 750GB and 1TB storage capacities. The new drives have twice the normal cache size of typical drives with 32MB of high-performance cache memory. The Black edition drives also feature dual electronics architecture processors for twice the processing power.

The motor shaft on the drives is secured at both ends to reduce vibration and the technology is dubbed StableTrac. Western Digital also uses NoTouch ramp technology that prevents the recording head from touching the media for reduced wear and longer operational life. The Caviar Black line uses SATA 3.0 interface. The buffer to disk transfer rate is 145MB/s max.

The Caviar Black drives can withstand operating shock of 30G and a non-operating shock of 250G. At idle the drive produces 24 dBA of sound, seek mode 0 produces 33 dBA, and seek mode 3 produces 29 dBA of sound. The rotational speed of the drives is 7200 RPM.

Both the 750GB and 1TB drives will be available next week with the 750GB retailing for $199 and the 1TB retailing for $249. Western Digital didn’t comment on the platter size used in the new Black drives. Western Digital recently moved to 334GB platters for some of its other 1TB Caviar drives.

Source from DailyTech