While at E3 I met up with the folks at Western Digital to discuss their future plans for the enthusiast market.  They were obviously very happy about the success of the Raptor drive in the market and were looking on towards the next step in their high-RPM drives.  Perhaps we’ll see some higher capacities soon?

In other news that we can discuss, WD announced a 16MB cache part to compete against Maxtor’s drives that have been out for a few months recently. 

LOS ANGELES – May 18, 2005 (E3 Expo Booth No. 6706/Kentia Hall) – Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced it is now shipping in volume hard drives offering Serial ATA (SATA) interface with 300 MB/s burst data transfer rate. The new WD Caviar® SE16 hard drives feature 16 MB cache – 2 to 8 times the cache size of standard desktop-class hard drives – which, combined with its 300 MB/s transfer rate, deliver a one-two performance punch for customers.

The new desktop-class hard drives are available now from WD-authorized distributors and in OEM PCs. State-of-the-art SATA with 300 MB/s performance that is up to 3 times faster than EIDE make WD Caviar SE16 drives one of the fastest desktop-class hard drives on the market, perfectly suited for use in high-performance computers, multimedia and gaming systems.