After making do with 5,400rpm and 5,900rpm 2TB drives and the occasional 1.5TB disc drives, it’s finally here: 7,200rpm two-terabyte hard drives. I’ve seen rigs on these monsters and they are the bomb!

The 2TB Caviar Black is decked out to drop panties of the most jaded gamer, with four 500GB platters, two discrete processors, 64MB of rapid cache, and a double-stage actuator system that engages a piezoelectric actuator head in tandem with the standard magnetic actuator, allowing precise tracking for amazing seek times. The Caviar Black brags WD’s standard No-Touch ramp loader, hence the read/write head perpetually avoids contact with the platters, increasing the drive’s lifespan. Expect these babies to outlast your main PC.

All these toys make the 2TB Caviar Black speed past Superman himself with sustained reads and writes—exceeding 112MB/s. That’s 20 percent faster than the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB’s read speeds. And because of the greater areal density of the Caviar drive, its random-access read and write times are just 7.3ms and 4.8ms, respectively. Only a VelociRaptor or solid state drive could beat that. Not even Flash on steroids could. Of course, solid state drives offer the best performance—like the $370 Patriot Torqx.

The 2TB Caviar Black has an MSRP of $300. If you’re a serious gamer, you definitely want this. For perspective, 7 years ago, a 1Gig Hard disc at 5400 cost $800.

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