Western Digital appears to be accelerating its 2TB 3.5-inch drive from 5400rpm to 7200rpm if a weekend wave of European hard disk drive etailing mentions are to be believed.

WD introduced a desktop 2TB Caviar Green drive at the beginning of the year. Then there came an enterprise WD RE4-GP 2TB drive in April, and both rotated at 5400rpm. There have been rumours of a 7200rpm 2TB Caviar Black drive, with a Japanese promotion card mentioning it in June.

With the weekend's wave of web mentions, for example, here, it appears that a part at least of WD's European reseller channel is pre-selling the RE3 WD2002FBYS drive.

It is listed as a 2TB and 3.5-inch drive, spinning at 7200rpm, with a 32MB cache, 8.7msecs access time, and 5-year warranty. There are four 500GB platters, which makes it a higher density drive than the Hitachi GST 2TB model announced last week, which needed 5 platters to achieve its 7200rpm speed.

We haven't spotted a delivery date yet but are guessing that it will ship by the end of September, if not before. Prices vary between €260 - €280 (£223 - £240). ®

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