Hard disk drives are a frequently neglected performance enhancement for many computer builders. You've got your blazing fast processor, a gazillion megs of RAM, a hot rod graphics card, and you're still using a puny little 5400 RPM hard drive from a machine you built two years ago? It just isn't right. Western Digital's Caviar 7,200 RPM 100 GB Special Edition hard drive adds an 8 MB buffer to spin speed and capacity, which the company says provides a higher percentage of cache hits and significantly faster time to data than traditional 2 MB versions. It's currently available in limited quantities via Western Digital's online store and through "select WD channel partners" at a price of $379. For those of you who need schooling on the operations of the disk buffer, it's used to hold the results of recent reads from the disk, and to pre-fetch information that is likely to be requested in the near future. WD says that the use of an increased buffer improves the performance of the WD Caviar 100 GB Special Edition hard drive by reducing the number of physical accesses to the disk and allowing data to stream from the disk uninterrupted by mechanical operations. The 8 MB buffer can also help out in a server environment, where data is accessed across wider portions of the disks. With additional buffer resources, read and write commands are more quickly queued and served up to the user. Patrick talks about the need for a larger cache in this hard drive review from last month . Also, I know I don't usually send you off to companies' online stores, but WD did say "limited quantities," so if you want one, off you go...