WD ups Caviar HDD capacity, lowers thermals

Cooler than slower drives, apparently

Western digital announced this week that its Caviar family of hard drives now runs at significantly lower temperatures and uses less power - not only than the company's own drives but less than all of its rivals' products, the company claimed.

The new models, which spin at 7200rpm, also run cooler than many slower, 5400rpm drives, WD claimed.

Quite apart from beating up on the competition, the drives' lower temperature operation should improve their operating lifespan, not to mention reducing the energy consumed by host PCs keeping themselves cool. That's even in "challenging environments such as small-form-factor PCs, fan-less consumer electronics devices and multi-drive storage systems", the company said.

The cooler-running drives arrive as WD added a 320GB model to its current Caviar line-up. That range includes drives with capacities ranging from 40GB to 250GB, with 2MB or 8MB of cache. The Caviar SE 320GB drives have an 8MB cache and run at 7200 RPM. The drives offer a mean read seek time of 8.9ms and a write time of 10.9ms.

Serial ATA (model number WD3200JD) and EIDE (WD3200JB) versions will be offered, WD said. They will be available at stores next month, and may be pre-ordered at the company's online store. ®

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