In addition to the WD Caviar 100GB Special Edition hard disk drive launched in October 2001, which differs from the regular model by the buffer increased from 2MB to 8MB, Western Digital today announced one more HDD from the Special Edition family. This time, the modification touched upon a 120GB WD1200BB, which buffer was also enlarged up to 8MB. All other features of WD Caviar 120GB Special Edition remained the same as those of WD1200BB.
The press-release about a new EIDE hard disk drive with an unprecedentedly large buffer tells us that its performance exceeds the speed of HDDs with the regular 2MB buffer by 32%. Of course, we can’t check if this number is true or not, however, we expect the fourfold increase in the buffer size to have some positive effect at least in tasks dealing with video editing, for instance.
You can buy a new WD Caviar 120GB Special Edition for $389 in Western Digital online store. That is about 30% more expensive than the cost of the original WD1200BB solution.