Thursday, December 9th 2010
Western Digital Intros Caviar Blue HDDs with SATA 6 Gb/s Interface
Western Digital (WD) announced a new line of Caviar Blue line of 3.5" SATA hard drives that make use of the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. Caviar Blue strikes a balance between performance and energy efficiency, it's a middle-ground between the performance-oriented Caviar Black, and energy efficiency-oriented Caviar Green. The drive uses a spindle speed of 7200 RPM. The new lineup of Caviar Blue drives also support 4K sectors, also known as Advanced Format. The drives are available in capacities of 250 GB, 320 GB, and 500 GB, which feature 16 MB cache; 750 GB and 1 TB, which feature 32 MB cache. Fairly standard pricing which are on par with prices of existing price per gigabyte of Caviar Blue drives, can be expected.
9 Comments on Western Digital Intros Caviar Blue HDDs with SATA 6 Gb/s Interface
these drives are the future, but incompatibilities arise because of it.
XP and older wont like them and will need to be aligned via special software.
Ghosting/cloning partitions will also need the same software, unless they're updated to support 4K sectors.
Linux and Mac OSX are not effected, funnily enough.
Just like SATA 3.0Gb/s, in fact mechanical drives have only very recently started to surpass SATA 1.5Gb/s bandwidth...
It would be stupid for a company not to add improvements to their drives, even if it is a small one. The consumer is only winning here.
In fact, they're not even the fastest drives in the range, which are the Caviar Blacks, for those unfamiliar with WD.
And SATA 6.0Gb/s is all about bandwidth, NCQ and power management stays pretty much unchanged, the minor changes made in SATA 6.0Gb/s won't be noticeable.