WD Caviar Special Edition SATA 250 GB Hard Drives

Western Digital have just announced their new Caviar Special Edition (SE) Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive range, which is not only the world's largest 7,200RPM drive at 250GB with an 8MB buffer, but also includes a number of new technologies. The first is its "SecureConnect SATA cable technology, which is designed to solve a weakness of first-generation SATA hard drives and cables by strengthening the drive-cable connection by more than 500%, while ensuring the hard drive maintains backward compatibility with legacy SATA cables and backplanes. This strengthening of the drive-cable connection is intended to eliminate SATA connector breakage as well as reduce the number of related product returns to hard drive makers and systems manufacturers."

Another new technology featured on Caviar Special Editiion drives is Flex Power technology, which "accepts a power connection from either the traditional EIDE power connectors-found in virtually all of today's desktop systems-or other currently shipping SATA power supplies." This is demonstrated in the above image.

Western Digital will be shipping SATA-equipped WD Caviar SE hard drives featuring SecureConnect and FlexPower through its distribution network in June. The Company's major OEM customers are currently qualifying the products SecureConnect cables with FlexPower will be available through Western Digital's distribution network beginning in July.

Read the entire press release .