Western Digital's 2TB Caviar Green HDD on sale in Australia

Just as we'd heard, Western Digital is indeed producing (and shipping) a standalone 2TB internal hard drive. Available now for purchase from Mwave Australia, the 3.5-inch WD20EADS sports a 7,200RPM spin speed, 32MB of cache and a AU$377.80 price tag, which converts to just under $250 in greenbacks. We get the feeling that this drive is just hours away from launching here in the US of A (we're guessing the time zones are to blame), so we'll be keeping a close eye out for early reports on performance.

[Thanks, Danny]

[NishiGotanda Posted Jan 27th 2009 1:20AM]

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.

[Shelbz Posted Jan 27th 2009 1:26AM]

They are so big you can rip tons of blu.....stuff and fit it in there

[Techlifter Posted Jan 27th 2009 1:58AM]

@ 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)

[Bluekkis Posted Jan 27th 2009 2:56AM]

2TiB limit comes from ancient MBR partitioning used by 99% of PC/BIOS systems. Will need GUID partitioning for larger partitions.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 30th 2009 4:51PM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 2:00AM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 2:55AM]

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?

[KyleHase Posted Jan 27th 2009 3:09AM]

You'll have less than 14TB of space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measurements

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 3:11AM]

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?

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 3:30AM]

wait.... so your telling me something electronic related came out in Australia BEFORE the US? i am shocked

[Luke D Posted Jan 28th 2009 6:24AM]

You must've missed the iPhone 3G.

[JerseyBricklayer Posted Jan 27th 2009 3:45AM]

DAMN! Thats alota pr0n you can store on there.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 4:09AM]

How long do you guys think it will take until this ends up in an External drive? Like the My Books.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 5:12AM]

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.

[pika2000 Posted Jan 27th 2009 5:13AM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 6:07AM]

im sure thats what was said about the 10gb drive

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 9:14AM]

What makes it green??

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2009 9:59AM]

5400 & low power consumption

[Stapyhlococcus Posted Jan 28th 2009 6:39AM]

YAY Go Australia!!