After the successful launch of the Scorpio Black family of 2.5-inch drives last week, Western Digital has now launched the new Caviar Black family of performance drives. The Caviar Black family of drives will be home to WD’s highest capacity drives that offer performance for desktop, workstation, and multi-drive configurations.

The new Caviar Black drives will also be among the first from WD to offer a dual processor design to maximize performance with twice the processing power that is available in the traditional Caviar drives. In addition, WD is ramping up the cache in the Caviar Black offerings to 32MB. The Caviar Black drives will also offer StableTrac and NoTouch technologies, which will add to the reliability of the drives in the Caviar Black family.

The initial offerings in the Caviar Black product family will be 750BG (WD7501AALS) and 1TB (WD1001FALS) which will be available starting next week for a MSRP of US$199 for the 750GB model and US$249 for the 1TB model. Drives in the Caviar Black product line will carry a five-year limited warranty from Western Digital.

As for the next focus on colors, as part of the product families from Western Digital things seem to have come a bit more in focus in this regard. Drive families with “Black” in the product name will be the highest performance offerings that are targeted at enthusiasts who are looking for the best in performance and technology.

The only thing that WD will be offering above the Black series drives will be the Raptor series products that target the ultimate in performance with less capacity. The “Green” family of drives will focus on WD’s efforts in GreenPower technology for cool, quiet, and eco-friendly operation. The “Blue” family of products will focus on the mainstream performance and reliability that Western Digital has been building into its hard drives for over 20 years. We expect a continued shift over to this “color coded” strategy that WD claims will help consumers pick the best hard drive for their particular application.