Western Digital said it has expanded its highest performing desktop hard drive series, the WD Black line, to 4 TB capacity. Shipping immediately, this new 3.5-inch hard drive will soon be available through select distributors and resellers for $339 USD, joining the 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB models already on the market.
"Maximizing the features and functionality of power computing applications such as gaming, multimedia and video editing, the new WD Black 4 TB hard drives offer capacity and performance—without compromise," said Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD’s client storage group. "In choosing WD Black hard drives, WD desktop customers get the best possible mix of capacity, performance and reliability to handle intense desktop computing with ease."
The Black series of HDDs features a 7200 RPM spin speed, 32 MB or 64 MB of cache, dual stage actuator technology, a SATA 3 (6 Gb/s max) interface, and an integrated dual processor to maximize performance. There's also NoTouch ramp load technology to make sure the recording head never touches the spinning platter.
"Dual actuator technology [is] a head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s)," WD said. "The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy."
According to the 4 TB version's spec list, the drive uses 10.40-watts while reading and writing data, 8.10-watts when sitting idle, 1.20-watts while on standby and 1.20-watts when in sleep mode. Other features include a (nominal) average latency of 4.20-ms, a minimum of 300,000 load/unload cycles, and an average 34 dBA when in seek mode.
For more information about the WD Black line of desktop HDDs, head here.
