After releasing relatively low-performance 2TB hard drives a few months ago, Western Digital announced Tuesday that it's now shipping high-performance versions of these top-capacity drives.

The new drives are the WD Caviar Black and the WD RE4. According to the company, the former is designed for desktops while the latter is suited for servers and network storage devices.

These two new hard drives are based on WD's 500GB-per-platter technology. They both combine 7200rpm spin speed, 64MB cache, dual-stage actuator technology, SATA 2 (3Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor.

(Dual actuator technology is a head-positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track. The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.)

Full story: c|net