Caviar is the collective spawn of certain large fish and, reportedly, a delicacy. Which probably isn't too dissimilar to this drive.
Caviar is the collective spawn of certain large fish and, reportedly, a delicacy. Which probably isn't too dissimilar to this drive, metaphorically speaking. New HDDs continue to grow in size and they're not about to stop. Only there is a SATA bandwagon, but not everyone is willing to jump on-board yet. So, just to give everyone a darned good reason to stay back a little longer, Western Digital has whipped out a behemoth 320GB 7200rpm PATA drive.As you may know however, the 320GB tag is not exactly what one might think -- before formatting, this technically amounts to 298GB of free space. It's something we've come to expect from hard drives for awhile now, and the problem will only get bigger -- or is that smaller -- as time goes on.In our standard AMD test bench, we clipped on the new Caviar and let it strut its stuff. Testing with SiSoft Sandra 2005, it managed a sweet 55MB/s drive index. For comparison, the Western Digital 36GB SATA 10,000rpm Raptor we looked at some time ago spat out a drive index of 43MB/s. Per se, it's evident this new drive is no lamer and PATA can still whoop some SATA arse. It also runs significantly cooler and quieter than the Raptor.Nothing spectacularly different from the norm, aside from the mighty boost in storage retainage and the use of PATA. Grab a few of these and you'll laugh insanely, bringing you slightly closer to the holy one quadrillion bytes. Recommended for the storage buff.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012