Western Digital's Special Edition hard drives are designed to maximize desktop computer performance for activities requiring high-performance storage such as computer gaming, digital video editing, and file server applications. Offering the largest capacities, the Western Digital's Special Edition family is equipped with an 8 MB buffer - the largest buffer available today in a desktop EIDE hard drive, delivering data to users faster than any hard drive in its class. The Special Edition hard drive provides a higher percentage of cache hits and significantly faster time to data than industry-standard 2 MB versions. Within the complex operations of hard drives, the buffer is used to hold the results of recent reads from the disk, and also to "pre-fetch" information that is likely to be requested in the near future. The use of an increased buffer improves the performance by reducing the number of physical accesses to the disk and allowing data to stream from the disk uninterrupted by mechanical operations.