Western Digital is rebranding its Caviar line of drives -- or maybe "recolorizing" is the proper word. Starting today, all of the company's Caviar-series hard drives will begin to fall under one of three colors: blue for "professional" drives of no particular importance, black for upper-level "niche" drives that push for high performance, and green for energy-saving-themed drives.

Leading the charge to this new color palate is Western Digital's newest creation, the 1TB Caviar Black. Coming in sizes of 750GB and 1TB, the three-platter drive now gives Samsung a competitor on the upper echelon of storage. Previously, Samsung's Spinpoint HD103UJ was the only consumer-grade hard drive to offer 1 terabyte of storage using only three platters. As a result of the increased areal density, the drive enjoyed an unmatched run to the top of our benchmark charts.

The Caviar Black looks to retake this performance foothold while still offering a number of proprietary Western Digital features designed to promote data retention. As any amount of vibration has the potential to promote data loss, Western Digital is securing its drive motors on both the top and bottom of the platters to reduce the effects of mild jittering on the drive. Similarly, the drive heads never touch the platters when parking. According to Western Digital, this should improve the Caviar Black's overall reliability.

The drive's other specs are what we'd expect from any drive of its class: a 3Gb/s SATA interface, a 32MB cache, and a 7,200 RPM rotation speed. Expect the drives to come in at an MSRP of $200 for the 750GB model and $250 for the terabyte version.

We'll have a review for this drive later today -- be on the lookout!

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