WD was cautious to move too fast with SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 last fall. When we talked to the company we were wondering if this conservative approach is really viable, but it looks like WD decided to change approach. The harddrive giant has already USB 3.0 products, which actually has great performance advantages over the last generation. Even if the gains with SATA 6Gbps are so small they are hard to measure with mechanical drives the company has shown some advance planning.
AKIBA [source broken] has sighted a new WD Caviar Black harddrive with 1TB capacity, 64MB cache and SATA 6Gbps. THe haddrive is called WD1002FAEX and not surprisingly it’s of the 3.5″ format. The price is around $120, which is slightly more than the regular SATA 3Gbps version of the Caviar Black series.
Whether the SATA 6Gbps interface offers any noticeable improvements is uncertain. The write speed is specified to 126MB/s but with 64MB memory buffer it is possible that the new interface may bring some minor performance boosts. The power consumption is rated 6.8W at load and the noise at most 33dB.
It’s good to see that WD is up and running with the latest technologies. Now we just want it to show a SATA 6Gbps SSD…
