GoHardDrive.com has the Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Hard Drive (bulk) for $80 with free shipping.
WD Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB HDD + iNeo I-NA306UE Leatherette 3.5" Enclosure for $90 with free shipping
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got mine from newegg a few weeks ago 1st one was bad. sent it rma back to wd. did not have no probs sending it back. got new one in, it works. a bit loud hdd only scored .1 higher then my sata 2 drive. not good drive for primary hdd on new system build. but make a decent storage drive.
Even in a SATA Gen2 system this drive is 30% faster than the Gen2 version in all the tests I ran, simply because of the 64mb cache (double the Gen2 version).
Doubling the cache from 16 to 32MB does not account for a 30% speed increase in real world uses. "Maybe" 4%. Maybe. Regardless, they are fine system/OS drives... as are most drives. Today with gigs of memory cheap the filecaching reduces what seem like large benchmark differences into very minor realized differences for running the OS, where there are lots of small files easily cached in main memory.
I wasn't running benchmarks, I guess I failed to mention that. I was mostly running real world scenarios like large and small file copies. for example: with the Gen2 version of the drive as the OS disk I was able to transfer 100GB file from a RAID volume to the OS disk at 70MB/s and with the Gen3 drive it went 92MB/s from the same RAID volume. And the cache was doubled from 32 to 64, not 16 to 32.
large (or small) copies make cache size almost irrelevant, not even 4% difference. It was other changes that account for the performance. Think about it, what a (larger) cache does... almost nothing on data that isn't re-read or written. A drive with all else equal but only 2MB cache would perform very similarly at that task.
I take that back in one case, if you are copying rather than moving files from the same drive they were read from the larger cache would help more, but most people don't use drives like that, why would people need a 2nd copy of same thing on the same drive except in rare cases?
Ok, maybe my comment should have been "this drive is much faster than the previous generation".
On the exact same hardware, with the exact same RAID1 volume, using the exact same image, the 64mb cache drive was 30% faster than the 32mb cache drive. maybe it has newer firmware as well. either way, the SATA3 drive is much faster than the SATA2 drive.