Western Digital Corp. yesterday introduced its WD Caviar Special Edition (SE) Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, the world's largest 7,200 RPM SATA hard drive. Carrying on the heritage of WD Caviar SE hard drives as industry-leading performers, these new SATA-equipped hard drives feature capacities as large as 250 GB, an 8 MB buffer and three-year warranty, to fill acute demand in market segments such as high-end PC, workstation and entry-level servers. The company also introduced its robust SecureConnect SATA cable technology, which is designed to solve a weakness of first-generation SATA hard drives and cables by strengthening the drive-cable connection by more than 500%, while ensuring the hard drive maintains backward compatibility with legacy SATA cables and backplanes. This strengthening of the drive-cable connection is intended to eliminate SATA connector breakage as well as reduce the number of related product returns to hard drive makers and systems manufacturers. According to IDC, SATA will replace PATA in most new PCs within the next two years. They estimate that in the enterprise storage market, PATA hard drives currently represent about ten percent of the overall segment and SATA, replacing PATA, will grow to nearly forty percent of drives consumed within the enterprise storage market in 2006. Western Digital will be shipping SATA-equipped WD Caviar SE hard drives featuring SecureConnect and FlexPower through its distribution network in June. The Company's major OEM customers are currently qualifying the products. SecureConnect cables with FlexPower will be available through Western Digital's distribution network beginning in July. WD Caviar SE SATA hard drives are available in capacities of 120, 160, 200 and 250 GB and feature 8 MB cache buffer, 7,200 RPM, SecureConnect, FlexPower and three-year warranty. Data throughput is 150 MB/second over the SATA interface. The performance roadmap for SATA extends up to 600 MB/second, ensuring a reliable standard for storage providers and customers in the years ahead. Additional information about WD Caviar Special Edition hard drives, SecureConnect and FlexPower may be found on the company's Web site http://www.westerndigital.com/products.