Western Digital Caviar Blue 160GB Internal Hard Drive

This hard drive provides a higher percentage of cache hits and significantly faster time to data than industry-standard 2 MB versions. Within the complex operations of hard drives, the buffer is used to hold the results of recent reads from the disk and also to "pre-fetch" information that is likely to be requested in the near future. The use of an increased buffer improves the performance by reducing the number of physical accesses to the disk and allowing data to stream from the disk uninterrupted by mechanical operations.