Western Digital has announced it is shipping the high-capacity 750GB Serial ATA (SATA) WD Caviar SE16 desktop-class hard drives.

Ideal for high-performance computing and multimedia systems, the WD Caviar SE16 750GB drives deliver high performance with 3 Gb/s transfer rate, 16MB cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

"WD knows that there is nothing more important than our customers' data", said Don Bennett, WD vice president and general manager of desktop storage. "Uniquely, our new desktop hard drive brings together SecurePark for
better shock characteristics, StableTrac for better vibration performance, and IntelliSeek to reduce power consumption. These proven features will further WD's lead as the most reliable desktop products."

The high capacity is in part thanks to the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology, where the magnetisation of each data bit is aligned vertically to the spinning disk, rather than longitudinally allowing more data on a given disk than is possible with conventional recording.