Western Digital's 2TB Caviar Green HDD on sale in Australia
By Darren Murph 
posted Jan 26th 2009 11:47PM
posted Jan 26th 2009 11:47PM
[Thanks, Danny]
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7,200RPM? Nice. If I recall, their last Green Power drives ran at around the 5,400RPM mark (though they never advertised that). I picked up a 1TB Green Power with the 16MB cache on boxing day for around $110 and it was pretty quick for a 5,400RPM drive. Hopefully these ones are just as quick (if not quicker).
On a side-note, anyone know the platter capacity? Are they still shoving 333GB platters in there or have WD also moved to the 500GB platter?
I'm guessing this is made with 4x500GB platters. 2TB with 333GB platters would require 6 platters...which I think would produce too much heat and be too bulky.
If they were 333 GB/platter, they'd have to use 6 platters. That seems kind of unlikely.
From what I've observed, the drives operate at *both* 5400 and 7200 RPM. Depending on load and what the specific disk operations are that are queued up, they switch between those two speeds dynamically.
I have 4 of the TB drives in a RAID 5 for a modeling/image processing (astronomical imagery) and have noticed this behavior. It actually doesn't affect performance as well, and seems to cut down on power use. Somewhat cool, if you ask me.
it uses 4 platters with each (obviously) having a capacity of 500giggers!!!!
They will hardly hit 7200... The previous ones were advertised as "Variable speed" 5400-7200 which obviously is BS. All test show 5400 rpm and designing a variable speed drive would cost a lot more trouble than it's worth!
Hopefully they've also developed the NO-F*-OVER-YOUR-CUSTOMERS patch that Seagate is still working on.
I've been holding off on buying a 1TB-1.5TB drive due to the 7200.11 issues and I'm not sure if I'll trust Seagate enough to buy a 7200.12 drive when they are finally released (no doubt too early and with crappy firmware)
You've got my dollar, WD
WD is lovely, aside from their World Books, of course.
"7,200RPM? Nice. If I recall, their last Green Power drives ran at around the 5,400RPM mark"
Aren't these the drives that run BETWEEN 5400 and 7200? I have a 640GB one in my desktop and that's exactly what it does.
just in time for my home server
i kno right. these are really nice and better then the Seagates 1.5TB, especially after the problems they had with the 1TB, id be scared to go with them. although the 250 is kinda heft, but still a good price for 2TB, and i mean expensive if your like me cuz ill want two of these, one thats gonna back up the other one in a home server that even isnt built or money to be built, lol. but definatly nice
I was just thinking the same thing. My dead mobo 8TB array can now become a 16TB array!
Your welcome Engadget.
Thanks Danny
What is the biggest drive one can get for a laptop these say?
500GB, in most cases only at 5400rpm.
thanks for the info totalfixation
Remember back in the day when 100GB laptop hard drives were mind boggling? Those were the days!
@dagamer34
100GB!!! Man, what I would have given for that big a drive on my first "real" desktop computer. I bought a Cybermax mid-tower for $2500 that came with a 250MB drive. That's megabytes, not gigabytes. I added a 300MB drive for a cool $250. Oh, and before someone chimes in with "well, when I had MY first computer...", I'll let you all know that I had to walk uphill (both ways) through a raging blizzard in the middle of bear country to buy that first computer.
Size: 320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
RAID Performance: 400GB (2x200GB) 7200RPM Free Fall Sensor
RAID Performance: 500GB (2x250GB) 5400RPM
RAID Protection: 640GB (2x320GB) 5400RPM
Reliability: 64GB Solid State Drive plus 200GB SATA HD (7200RPM w/ FFS)
Ultra Performance: 256GB Solid State Drive
These are the drives that were available for my laptop. I went with the 400 GB drive.
dear god.
it makes the 1TB samsung i got this summer look obsolete already.
I love technology.
sounds awesome!!
anyone have a guess when the 1TB will drop in price?
days???
weeks???
months???
Momentarily.
It's nice to know that whenever my existing 750s drop, they can be replaced by drives at least as big as these. I don't see storage being an issue for me in the near future.
Wouldn't it be cool to hack an Apple Time Capsule with one of these puppies. I did that with a 1TB green drive (WD10EADS) and the thing is whisper quiet.
once i can get a 1 TB drive for $60... i will finally fill my drive bays.
until that day... ill be content with my 400GB of storage
how could someone ever use that much of space
i can barley use 40gbs
Obviously you dont use your computer for video.
Space is driving me nuts, i keep filling up my iMacs 250gb internal, i have a 500gb for backup and another 500gb for storage but even then im running out of room.
I would NEVER buy a mechanical 2TB drive. Just imagine the loss when it decides to die one day.
You can barley? Are you making homemade beer in your bathtub?
then you're doing it wrong.
i habitually engage in a provocative activity that involves my hand.
that activity is much more enjoyable when watching two people intermingle in coital and fellatio acts.
add those two up and add some hi-def quality... 2TB is a small, small, storage space.
that or it gets filled with music, games, and movies
Pure DVD rips = 5GB+ each. Some are 8GB. Do the math, it's easy to fill.
clearly you haven't discovered the wonderful world of torrents! lol
So what's the capacity of this thing after formatting? I'm guessing you will lose about 150GB in the format.
2,000,000,000,000 B = approximately 1862 GB
It's not an issue of losing space to the format (though the manufacturers are surely happy to let people assume that). The drive's capacity is not actually 2 TB (a terabyte being 1024 gigabytes, a gigabyte being 1024 megabytes, and so on), but 2 trillion bytes. They just choose to define a terabyte as 1000 gigabytes so they can put a bigger number on the box.
Some folks don't need this space. Other folks, on the other hand... Me, I'm salivating over the idea of being able to have my entire CD library in lossless format on a single drive. Just when I finished ripping it to MP3! Oh well, it's not like I had anything more important or interesting to do. :)
Adderz, i too dread the day when this drive fails, however with these HDD being so big I wouldn't ever use them singularly, 3disk RAID5 for me.
why wouldn't they update their websites? i just checked the american and the australian site and NO MENTION :(
SWEEEEEET!!!
I'm a getting me one of these asap!
Of course its four 500GB platters and yes, it'll be 5400rpm just as the previous ones. The variable speed of the previous ones have been VERY illusive throughout all tests I've seen and it's probably the case with this one as well... Although it will definately be faster than the previous 333GB/platter disks since the density is higher. At least for large files and sequential read/write. Otherwise the WD controllers are pretty awesome though! Even if there are ways to get better performance, this isn't meant to be a system drive, although it would do the job well in a one drive environment, but as a storge drive for media files it would totally own (pwn) the competition if you're putting performance/power (and $$$) into the equation!
PS. I already have a three-platter 1TB drive of the same make & model and it's great!
The variable speed of the previous ones have been VERY illusive
I thought the WD site said that their green drives uses 5400 to 7200 RPM depending on model but they are fixed for a particular drive.
Green power. The scam continues.
I'm ready to save the earth by buying more electronics!
uses less power and cost lest to make, i dont care about the speed of my drive in a nas or external
I see it listed on buy.com
WD20EADS
buy.com
$271.99
http://www.buy.com/prod/3-5-2tb-sata-32mb-green-dsk/q/loc/101/210673283.html?dcaid=15890
- says temporarily sold out
- not listed at NewEgg or Amazon yet.
I'm gonna need some of these, got the 1 TB and it seems good so far....
Hurray! Thank god for time zones, it might take a year for us to get Rock Band releases (thats right, a year, still waiting on RB2) but when it comes to date releases we pull through. Looking forward to the 2 day early release of Halo Wars, thats right people.... two days.
In more related matters, 2TB looks awesome. Too bad I am stuck with the, almost full, 250GB in my Mac. Think about all the *iTunes Movies* you could fit on that!
Will order 12 of them to update the DROBO system... now I can really load up the movies (legit - don't get too excited) in the Media System for the house and keep files semi-safe and multi-redundant (not RAID) for the lab and home.
I love technology!
@Owen Uridge - you are soooooo right but it is still fun, aye.
If you are truly worried about "green" switch to an abacus and two cans with a long string. That should fill all of your green technical needs.
Those cups never degrade idiot. That is the opposite of what is green.
Since Drobo won't let you create any partitions greater than 2TB... you understand you're just going to end up with a WHOLE LOT OF DISKS RIGHT? Not one great big 6-8TB drive?
[Oh, and NO, the Drobo guys have NOT fixed this issue. They claim its a USB limitation.]
@HumbleDestroyer
He said, "cans" not, "cups."
Idiot.
There is no such USB limitation. However, there is a limitation with the FDISK partition scheme. If you use Vista 64 or Windows 7 64 you can use GPT disk format and exceed 2TB.
Cool
Always fun to read the comments about "what do you need all this space for"...
The more space you have, the more ways you'll find of using it. Here's a current example:
Lossless ripping of DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray, playback straight from ISO to retain all menus, subtitles and extras:
300 DVDs, averaging 6 Gb - 1.8 Tb
50 Blu-rays, averaging 40 Gb - 2 Tb
Digital photos
15,000 and growing, averaging 4 Mb, at least two copies stored in different locations: a measly 120 Gb
Camcorder AVCHD files:
Raw dump for archiving: 300 Gb
Transcoded for editing: 1 Tb
Approaching 6 Tb already. While I have hardcopies of all DVDs and Blu-rays, re-ripping them is a royal pain in the ass, so basically all files need basic protection.
All of this goes into a cheap case/PSU with G45 motherboard (6 SATA ports) running a low-power E7200 Core2 Duo, 8 Gb RAM, OpenSolaris and ZFS in a RAID-Z configuration. Now there's a robust home NAS for you. These new 2 Tb puppies will fit right in.
They are so big you can rip tons of blu.....stuff and fit it in there
@ Fanfoot:
"Since Drobo won't let you create any partitions greater than 2TB... you understand you're just going to end up with a WHOLE LOT OF DISKS RIGHT? Not one great big 6-8TB drive?
[Oh, and NO, the Drobo guys have NOT fixed this issue. They claim its a USB limitation.]"
Are you certain of that? The Drobo web site says that the 2TB limitation is on a FAT32 formatted series of drives. If you were to format them as HFS+ (or NTFS, for that matter), you would just have one, big, honkin' drive, no? (Taken from question #4 of the Drobo FAQ: http://drobo.com/products/faqs.php)
2TiB limit comes from ancient MBR partitioning used by 99% of PC/BIOS systems. Will need GUID partitioning for larger partitions.
It is absolutely not true that the Drobo has a 2TB volume size limit. Both the original USB-only model with up-to-date firmware and the newer USB and Firewire 800 model can have a volume size up to 16TB. When you first set up the unit you specify what volume size you want: 2, 4, 8 or 16TB. The unit "lies" to the OS and says it has whatever size you picked, regardless of the actual storage capacity of the hard disks installed in it. Mine right now is set to 8TB and contains four 1.5TB Seagate disks.
Originally what this person says was true. The max volume size was 2TB and they did claim that it was a USB problem, which it clearly was not since those older units can now do bigger. A tech support guy told me that over the phone (that it was a USB problem).
So has anyone put these new WD 2TB drives in a Drobo yet? Any issues? I can still return my 1.5TB drives so I'd like to know.
Great. Hopefully these drives will have the usual reliability of WD. And if we are lucky we will see some price drops in the smaller ones.
Wait...so if my mobo has 7 SATA ports, and I plug 7 of these in, then I have 14TB of space, spread across 7 drives, no strings attached?
You'll have less than 14TB of space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measurements
Very good. 7 x 2 = 14
Seriously though, there are some caveats.
1) 2TB does not = 2TB. Drive MFGs measure GB by saying 1000 bytes in a KB and not 1024 like in reality.
2) Formatting is going to eat ~ 7% of your drive space.
If you are running Vista and you have onboard RAID, you could also create a 14TB drive, but a limitation of BIOS says you cannot boot to anything bigger than 2TB. So you could use a 40GB PATA Drive for the OS and then still have your 14TB array. The trick is you have to use a GPT partition and not MBR.
Makes me wonder though. MACs use EFI which doesnt have that limitation of not being able to boot to a GPT Disk, so does that means you could boot from a >2TB Drive array, as long as you ran Vista on MAC Hardware?
wait.... so your telling me something electronic related came out in Australia BEFORE the US? i am shocked
You must've missed the iPhone 3G.
DAMN! Thats alota pr0n you can store on there.
How long do you guys think it will take until this ends up in an External drive? Like the My Books.
w/d suck's seagate is the only hd company that could even be sold for more than 1bil. it would be wrong for me to say that alone makes them better but the fact they've been leading the industry for so long means a whole lot. anyone who wouldn't buy a seagate drive just cause they've been having some problems in there current models (which i have 4 and they work just fine any problems and id of used the 5 year warranty) isn't very smart, id rather have a quality brand than settle for less till seagate gets there act together. they'll come out with something better than this soon enough.
2TB? Errr, I might wait a little bit longer, just in case there are firmware issues like Seagate. These ultra high density storage kinda scares me. Sure, I love Terabytes by the cheap, but I'm really concerned about the reliability of these.
im sure thats what was said about the 10gb drive
What makes it green??
5400 & low power consumption
YAY Go Australia!!