"Western Digital recently began to ship a new series of Caviar hard drives that included the company's Advanced Format technology. The new Caviar Green models are nearly identical to their standard brethren, but offer double the cache (64MB instead of 32MB at 1-2TB) and have a different model number. A WD10EARS is an Advanced Format drive; a WD10-EADS is a 'normal' drive.

"My first hard drive, entombed in a 1988 XT clone, stored 20 megabytes and clicked and chugged almost as much as my dad’s Buick. Back then, I worried about preserving 30KB text files. Now, I have to preserve, well, everything.

Perhaps like you, I’ve lost count of how many terabytes of capacity I have at my disposal, both on hand and online. We all know that solid state storage is great for speed and for shaving off seconds from your level load times, but hard drives safeguard your life.

For quite some time now, mechanical hard drives have stored data in 512-byte chunks called sectors. That sector size worked for lower capacity points, but as areal densities rise, it's become increasingly inappropriate for new drives. As a result, the industry has decided to transition to a 4KB sector size dubbed Advanced Format.

100% for Charity - Eleven of the computer industry's finest companies - including NVIDIA, ASUS, Crucial, Danger Den, Intel, Performance-Pcs.com, SilverStone, Smooth Creations, TigerDirect, Western Digital, and Outoftheboxmods.com, donated their products and services so that we could create one of the world's fastest and most unique computers - and then auction that complete system on eBay and donate 100% of the auction price to charity.