Should become available in the coming weeks

May 17, 2010 08:28 GMT  ·  By

The SATA 6.0Gbps interface has come along nicely since it was introduced, even being natively supported on the latest motherboard chipsets. Despite this, however, the number of actual storage devices capable of taking advantage of this standard is relatively small, with even Western Digital having just one on sale, at this time. Said storage unit, the WD2001FASS 1TB Caviar Black to be exact, is just about ready to have a sibling, however.

Western Digital will soon add a trio of HDDs that will support the next-generation interface. These newcomers will feature the 3.5-inch form factor, shall be part of the Caviar Blue series and will have storage capacities of 320GB, 500GB and 640GB, respectively. They shall also boast a cache memory of 32MB and will be recognizable by their AALX suffix (WD6400AALX).

One of the main assets of the upcoming platter spinners will be the Advanced Format technology. This is WD's proprietary technology that was made official back in December and has since shown up in several of the HDD supplier's products. What it does is increase sector size to 4096 bytes each. This does not only enable a 7-11% increase in disk space, but it also increases data integrity and Error Correcting capabilities by 50 percent. Windows 7 and MAC OS are the operating systems on which this feature works best, though Windows Vista and XP (through the use of a jumper) can also put it to good use. It can only be implemented when installing a new OS.

The HDD and SSD manufacturer has not yet given out any hint as to when these products will start selling, but an official announcement should be made over the coming weeks. In the meantime, consumers can find all the information they need on the Caviar Blue series by visiting the official product page on the company's website.