Western Digital has launched what it calls the largest capacity SATA drives in the world. The new 2.5TB and 3TB addition to the Caviar Green family of its hard disk drive (HDD) product line packs an areal density of up to 750GB per platter, essentially smashing the 2.19TB limitation of HDDs before it. Both the drives come with 64MB of cache and SATA 3.0 Gbps connectivity.

One word of caution for tech enthusiasts and system administrators is that the full 3TB capacity can only be realized in the 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. In addition, system motherboards should also support the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI); to enable systems that do not support UEFI to be bootable however, WD is shipping the new drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant HBA. The 3TB Caviar Green is currently shipping in the United States for a MSRP of $239 while the 2.5GB model can be purchased at $189.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at eWeek

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