Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB 120 GB

Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB 120 GB ... computer performance for activities requiring high-performance hard drives such as computer gaming, digital video editing, and file server applications. The WD Caviar 120 GB Special Edition is equipped with an 8 MB buffer - the largest buffer available today in a 7200 RPM desktop EIDE hard drive, delivering data to users faster than any hard drive in its class.

The Special Edition hard drive provides a higher percentage of cache hits than industry-standard 2 MB versions. Within the complex operations of hard drives, the buffer is used to hold the results of recent reads from the disk, and also to "pre-fetch" information that is likely to be requested in the near future. The use of an increased buffer improves the performance by reducing the number of physical accesses to the disk and allowing data to stream from the disk uninterrupted by mechanical operations.