Western Digital last week started shipping IDE hard disk drives with extremely large storage capacities: from 120GB up to 200GB. This way WD appeared ahead of Maxtor, which has been the one shipping the largest HDDs until recently: with 160GB storage capacity.

We would like to stress that Western Digital has been among the pioneers of the IDE hard disk drive market lately. Running no SCSI business, WD can afford to undertake experiments in the IDE market aiming at improving their features and performance without fearing to suffer any losses. This way, WD was the first one to start using 8MB buffer in its HDDs and now they appeared the first to offer a 200GB IDE device. I would also like to point out that these 200GB monsters use 66.7GB platters, which is also a sort of a record of this industry.

200GB solution called WD2000BB also acquired a very good name “Drivezilla”. This HDD boasts 7,200rpm spindle rotation speed. It supports ATA/100 protocol and is equipped with 2MB buffer. The average access time it show equals 8.9ms.

Note that the classical version of the ATA/100 protocol doesn’t allow working with hard drives with the storage capacity of over 137GB. That is why WD uses an updated version of this protocol for the Drivezilla, supporting 48bit addressing instead of 28bit one. This way, Drivezilla will be able to work normally in regular PCs only with Windows XP with Service Pack 1, which hasn’t been released yet. However, in other systems the problem may be eliminated by using a special controller and software shipped together with the drive.

The described above 200GB wonder costs $400.

By the way, according to forecasts, by the end of next year, ATA hard disk drives will use 100GB platters, and the overall storage capacity of these solutions will reach 400GB.