Western Digital Ships 750GB Hard Drives

It's going to take your BitTorrent client a while to fill these things. They're designed to hold anything you can throw at them, but also for reliability and low power consumption.

There’s just no limit to how much data you can pack into a 3-and-a-half-inch-wide slot, it seems. Western Digital announced its Caviar SE16 drives on Monday, which sport a whopping 750GB of storage capacity. Besides the huge amount of data the drives  hold, they’re capable of moving it at 3GB per second via a Serial ATA (SATA) interface, and come with a 16MB cache.

Western Digital also includes a host of other features that are supposed to improve reliability and power consumption. The company’s SecurePark technology removes the recording heads from the platters whenever the disk is spinning up, spinning down, or isn’t operating. It’s intended to improve shock tolerance and reduce long term-wear, which should lead to greater reliability. A motor shaft attached at two ends, dubbed StableTrac, is supposed to reduce the vibration that leads to missed revolutions. Finally, for the energy-conscious, there’s IntelliSeek to reduce power consumption. It works by calculating the "optimum seek speed"  for the actuator, reducing sudden acceleration and the excess electricity needed for it. Western Digital claims the technology cuts energy consumption by 60 percent and makes the drives cooler and quieter.

The Caviar SE16 is available immediately through Western Digital’s Web site for $249.