WD's 750 GB Hard Disk Sets New Records

WD Delivers Performance And Massive Storage

After numerous improvements to the underlying technologies involved, it looks like Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) is responsible for most of the latest performance and capacity gains. Magnetization is no longer horizontal, following the lines of rotation around the disk platter (also known as longitudinal recording). Now, it's vertical and extends into the surface of the disk platter itself. This enables much greater data densities in the same surface area, and as a happy consequence, also speeds up the rates at which data may be read or written. Other hard disk performance parameters, such as drive cache size, play only an ancillary role, as we explain in our article Understanding Hard Drive Performance.

Seagate was the first company to release products built around PMR technologies. Other vendors, including Western Digital, tend to be a bit more conservative when it comes to adopting new technologies. Their latest product, though, the Caviar SE 16 WD7500AAKS, need not surrender pride of place to any of the competing Serial ATA drives currently available. This latest 750 GB top-of-the-line offering beats all the other 7,200 RPM drives, and performs on a par with the 10,000 RPM WD1500 Raptor (although it cannot beat the 74 GB version, the WD740).

We did our best to dig into just how the new Caviar SE16 WD7500 performs Compare Prices on Caviar 750 GB Drives.

Join our discussion on this topic

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.