We recently reported about a new version of WD's 1TB Caviar Black series hard disk that first showed up in Japan which makes full use of SATA 3.0 (6Gbps).

The folks at PC Perspective have obtained a sample in which they compare the drive's performance to a stack of other WD drives currently on the market. They test with Intel's ICH10R as well as making full use of SATA 3.0 in conjunction with a couple controllers from Marvell; one with caching and one without.

The WD1002FAEX can now be found on the market at a price point not far above the $100US mark. This should drop below $100 once the drive becomes more widely available.