Earlier this year Western Digital released a 400GB SATA II hard drive in their Caviar series, which boasted a 16mb cache and the industry-average 7200rpm speed. Just a short time later they have one-upped themselves, revamping the drive and giving it many new features that make it much more welcome in the workstation and enterprise environment, where using SATA over tried-and-true SCSI is becoming more and more commonplace.
These new baddies support Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward and Time Limited Error Recovery, two features that help the drive maintain consistent performance and reliability, something very friendly for the server market.
And warranty friendly, too. After 2000, most hard drive manufacturers stopped offering long warranties on their products like we were accustomed to. New HDDs were coming with at most 1 year warranties. A year! This resulted in a lot of negative feedback, and over the past year we have seen the return of 3- and 5- year warranties from Western Digital, Seagate, and others.