Hard drive optimized for multimedia
Western Digital announces a high-capacity hard drive that's designed with audio and video editing and playback in mind.
Western Digital's WDE9100AV provides a storage capacity of 9.1 gigabytes, among the largest in the industry, and also data buffer and caching technologies that Western says improves the delivery of multimedia data from the hard drive to the processor. Audio and video data tax a system's resources because it comes in a large and nearly continuous stream.
Computers typically suffer data transmission bottlenecks because the speed at which the processor operates is faster than the rate of data delivery from the hard drive or peripheral devices. Buffers and caching are used to get around the bottleneck, by serving as interim storage areas and keeping the processor fed with data.
Western Digital's news hard drive comes with an Ultra SCSI interface, a technology for high-speed transfer of data between the hard drive and the processor. The device also features a fast data "seek" time, according to Western.
The WDE9100AV "is specifically designed for the smooth flow of video frames and motion, and allows for continuous recording and playback functions, a must in data-intensive applications," said Bob Wenner, Western Digital's vice president of marketing, in a prepared statement.
Western's WDE9100AV will be available to original equipment manufacturers through resellers beginning this month.