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Western Digital said Thursday that it has begun shipping its 500-GB Caviar SATA drives, announcing new 120-GB Scorpio notebook drives in the process.
The WD Caviar SE16 desktop drives will retail for about $349.99 on WD's own online store, and will be priced accordingly by other retailers. WD is offering free shipping on the drives.

The SE16 drives spin at 7,200 RPMs, include a 16 Mbyte cache and include Native Command Queuing, a transitional feature to next-generation SATA drives.

"The WD Caviar family of hard drives delivers the reliability and performance that customers expect from WD," said Don Bennett, WD's vice president and general manager of desktop storage, in a statement. "The extreme capacity and high performance of this drive address a variety of demanding applications and expand WD's portfolio of storage products. From 6 to 500 GB, WD offers a diverse range of hard drives to meet our customers' wide-ranging storage needs."

WD faces a renewed challenge in 2006 from Seagate and Maxtor, which announced plans to merge in late 2005. Seagate announced and shipped its own 500-GB drives late last year.


To counter, WD has expanded its drive portfolio into the 2.5-inch market for notebooks; the new Scorpios are its latest play.

The latest 120-GB Scorpio drives will be offered in either traditional EIDE or the new SATA interface beginning in February, and are being offered direct from WD for $234.99. All of the new drives spin at 5,400 RPMs, and offer features like "WhisperDrive" and "ShockGuard" to minimize noise and vibration, respectively. WD said the drive's shock tolerance is 300 Gs while in operation, and 900 Gs in a non-operating mode.

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