Western Digital has announced that its Caviar SE16 dual-platter 640GB hard drives are now shipping in volume.

The high-end drives are built on the 320-GB-per-platter technology. They deliver “high performance with their extreme areal density, 3Gb/s transfer rate, and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).”

Expanding capacity

"The 640 GB capacity point will be an important one for our desktop customers, and WD is leading high-volume shipments to the channel and OEM customers," said Don Bennett, general manager and vice president of WD's desktop business unit.

"Two-platter hard drives have always been the perfect balance of value, capacity and performance for many of our customers.

“Today's common two-platter drives are limited to 500GB, but we are expanding capacity by 28 per cent on the same design with WD's leading technology heads and disks."