Western Digital's 7,200 RPM 120GB Drive With 8 MB Buffer

It was only back in October that Western Digital released its 100 GB Special Edition hard drive that featured an abnormally large cache. Now, for those of you who think bigger and faster is better (that's all of us isn't it?) the company has turned loose a 7,200 RPM Caviar 120 GB Special Edition hard drive that uses an 8 MB buffer. Once again, if you want a diatribe on the benefits of buffer size, you can check out Patrick's September article . WD says its Caviar 120 GB Special Edition 8 MB buffer hard drive offers a higher percentage of cache hits and faster time to data than 2 MB versions. The larger buffer improves performance because there is a reduction in the number of physical accesses to the disk. In server environments, additional buffer resources can mean that read and write commands are more quickly queued and dished up to the user. Western Digital's Special Edition 7,200 RPM Caviar 120 GB drive is priced at $389.