14 DAY TRIAL // The storage market is somewhat similar to the DRAM battlefield and can be translated into a single sentence: "you're late, you're dead". No wonder that the industry titans are in a continuous battle for the largest and cheapest hard disk drives. As if it were not enough, there's the new and shiny solid-state drives hysteria that shift the users' attention from the latest achievements in the spinning platters bandwagon.
Western Digital has announced the mass availability of its WD Caviar family of 3.5-inch hard drives, based on 320 GB-per-platter technology. The update increases the company's capacity per platter from 250 GB to 320GB, which means that the hard-drive manufacturer has successfully "ported" its laptop drives technology on the desktop mainstream parts. Previously, the same storage areal density platters were used in the 2.5-inch WD Scorpio drives the company has been shipping since October 2007.
"Our technology investments and product roadmap execution have resulted in WD shipping the industry's highest areal densities in the industry's two highest volume markets," said Hossein Moghadam, chief technology officer of WD. "Our 250 gigabits-per-square-inch technology already has been reliably serving our 2.5-inch customers, and now it will benefit customers in the 3.5 inch desktop and other product areas."
The new technology is alleged to be deployed across Western Digital's desktop, enterprise, CE and external hard drive product lines. Moreover, the new density point will bring the manufacturer up to the same storage capacity as archrival Seagate, since Hitachi could only achieved 250GB per platter by now.
The Caviar family of drives can deliver up to 300 MB/s transfer rate when connected to a SATA-II port. Moreover, it comes with 16 MB of cache, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), and cool operating temperatures.
"Our technology leadership strengthens WD's position with customers as the preferred hard drive supplier," said Richard E. Rutledge, senior vice president of marketing for the company. "Delivering new technologies first and within WD's high quality and reliability product standards, on time, in volume and backed by top service gives our customers, partners and suppliers a competitive advantage, as well."