Western Digital's 2TB Caviar Green hard drive launches, gets previewed
By Darren Murph 
posted January 27th 2009 8:00AM
posted January 27th 2009 8:00AM
WD® LAUNCHES INDUSTRY'S FIRST 2 TB HARD DRIVES
WD's Eco-friendly, Cool and Quiet, WD Caviar® Green™ Drive Marks the Largest Capacity Hard Drive in the Industry
LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Jan. 27, 2009 - WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced the first 2 terabyte (TB) hard drive – the world's highest capacity drive and the latest addition to WD's popular, environmentally friendly, cool and quiet, WD® Caviar® Green™ hard drive family. This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD's industry-leading 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) with 32 MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2 TB.
"While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries," said Mark Geenen, President of Trend Focus. "The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user's insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives."
WD Caviar Green is one of the most successful product lines in the company's recent history with its third-generation GreenPower™ technology, now providing 2 TB of proven reliable storage for today's high-resolution files and graphics. WD Caviar Green drives are designed for use in USB/FireWire®/eSATA external hard drives, desktop computers, workstations, and desktop RAID environments.
"Saving power without sacrificing storage capacity is what consumers want, and what many businesses are requiring today. With the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive, customers receive the additional capacities needed to operate today's highly advanced programs and high-resolution digital files while using less power than typical drives with similar performance and capacities," said Jim Morris, WD senior vice president and general manager of client systems.
Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture, Cool, Quiet Hard Drives
A number of advanced technologies enable the speed, capacity and performance of WD's Caviar Green 1.5 TB and 2 TB hard drives. Those include: StableTrac™, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations ; IntelliPower™, which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance; IntelliSeek™, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration; and NoTouch™ ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection while in transit.
Availability and Pricing
The WD Caviar Green 2 TB is available at select resellers and distributors. MSRP for the WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drives (model WD20EADS) is $299.00 USD. More information about WD Caviar Green desktop drives may be found on the company's Web site at http://wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=576
About WD
WD, one of the storage industry's pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that keep users' data accessible and secure from loss. WD applies its storage expertise to consumer products for external, portable and shared storage applications.
WD was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are marketed to leading systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers under the Western Digital® and WD brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company's Web site (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.
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Western Digital, WD, the WD logo and WD Caviar are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. in the US and other countries; Green, IntelliPower, IntelliSeek, NoTouch, StableTrac, and GreenPower are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks herein are property of their respective owner. As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. As used for buffer or cache, one megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes.
New material? Go check out Ariel's massive 2TB collection of pr0n a couple of posts above yours.
So why exactly is this a "green" drive ?
Because it uses slightly less power than a "normal" HDD, enviromental bullshit gets stuck to everything these days, and we swallow the lot.
Assuming it gives similar economy to the other Caviar GP drives, then it uses significantly less than most other drives on the market. Admittedly, that's only a few watts, but if you have a bunch...
I'll paint my hard di$k green if she'll swallow the lot.
wow ... I'm going to buy it! WD is so green and environmental!
I wish they would make a tad bigger drive so you can actually have a 2TB hard drive. Having a 181TB HD kindof sucks. It is still a lot but couldn't they just make it bigger so when you lose space it comes up to 2TB?
I got a 500gb fdrive for my laptop which is really 465gb.
I'd like a 181TB hard drive. stop complaining ;)
Black?
The drive is goin for 2500 SEK here in Sweden, shipping begins in a couple of weeks.
Awsome
Not a bad price, but I will wait for the first price cut and a few months of reviews before getting it.
Except that Western Digital sucks. Admittedly, all I've ever gotten from them were external drives, but those sucks. I bought one and had to have it replaced several times before the warranty was even up... I'd never buy from them again.
Ehm, if you knew jack-all about the current HDD market you'd know that WD are the current leaders of the pack. Don't know about their externals though, but those usually suck independent of manufacturer.
Emperer, They DO suck. Take a look at their return stats online. Better hardware, drive speed and more = seagate. you fail
@ProfessorKaos Go look at the Seagate forums and read about the firmware fiasco and then come and say how much better Seagate drives are. I have 4 of those drives and they are the last ones I'll ever buy from them.
I would definitely buy this hard drive but I'm going to wait for it to come down in price.
God.... I remember when a Gig used to cost 10$.... now its like 100gigs are 10$, soon itll be a TB is a 10$, lol.
Dude, I remember when a meg used to cost $10. Shoot I remember when it was $40 a meg. I remember getting a 20 meg drive and thinking I'd never fill it up.
Just think about a few of these setup in a RAID (5 or 6) configuration with a few SSDs also setup in a RAID configuration as a cache. You could easily have a multi TB storage setup that would absolutely fly for not much over a couple thousand dollars. Just a few years ago that would have easily cost 10s of thousands of $$$.
Put that in your green pipe and smoke it! Ya!
the only thing i do to green pipes is go down them... for tons of free coins.
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG 2TB!
wait, its Western Digital :(
@ProfessorKaos
And whats your prefered brand? Maxtor/Segate?
These "green products" almost always leave a larger carbon footprint than the regular ones.
In fact this HD is made out of spotted owl beaks and llama fur.
How long before these end up in an external drive? Like the MyBooks?
Has anyone seen actual retail availability on this drive. The WD store, Amazon, B & H, and J & R don't have them. So, who does?. . . . . .
Wait 6 hours then try again.
Yeah, I was wondering where exactly this is "available now"
That review is worthless as long as they print the "variable" spindle speed stat. No Green Power drive has ever had a variable spindle speed, and I doubt this will be the first.
I guess I'll have to wait until someone actually gets a chance to bench the rotational latency to be sure.
I read they've been using it on all green drives, not sure what's true though.
You read wrong.
Western Digital has only said that the Green Power line allows them to select the proper rotation speed on a model by model basis.
There has never been a model which runs at two different speeds depending on load. W-D never claimed there was, and testing has never found a drive that does.
Interesting, I think it would annoy me to hear the hum change all the time, depending on how the algorithm is tweaked I guess.
Replying to Major4Play
>So why exactly is this a "green" drive ?
Its a environmental tree-hugging hippie way of hiding the fact that its saving THEM more money then its saving us. They save money by providing cheaper servos and motors by going 'green' then they charge us the same price they would have, had they not gone 'green'.
GP (GREEN POWER) drives are all low power requirement, low heat drives that WD produces. The new generation, of which this is one, basically halves the watt requirement for the drive in use from drives of similar size (was something like 4 watts compared to 8-10 for other manufacturers). Thats there "Green" definition: you're using less power, producing less heat. Weak but thats it.
For those of you saying these are 5400 rpm drives, thats what they were rated at if I remember. They aren't meant for speed, but for energy-savings and lower heat. This new generation is suppose to up the performance to be more main stream but I don't know exactly how much better they are to the last ones.
Theses GP drives run very quiet and cool in external NAS and cases. I use em for storage where I don't need a particularly fast performance. If you want performance, well thats what the Black line is for.
If you want to compare reliability, For the 15 or so years I've been personally buying hard drives, I've only had 1 out of maybe 40 WD, compared to 4 out of 5 seagates die on me (the one that survived was the very good 540mb Seagate from waaay back). I don't think I have to explain why I purchased 40 WDs and only 5 seagates with that type of ratio. Most system builders I know tend to like WD over Seagate, they just tend to be more reliable imho.
wd hd tv here you come
This is definitely useful for those of us who have already used up the internal storage bays in our tower, don't wish to invest in external storage, but want to upgrade the storage on the existing internals.
Tivo HD friendly?
If you need the storage, get this. If you want something that will perform well, I would wait for another vendor.
Read this before buying: http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr?page=0%2C2
For those who can't be bothered, they go through with very careful analysis of the timing on the 1TB WD Green drive and conclude that it is basically a 5,400 rpm drive, not a "variable speed" drive that can go up to 7,200rpm.
It is possible that at 2TB and 500GB per platter the areal density is going to overwhelm the bus transfer rate or something, so that rotational speed won't matter anymore, though I doubt it, at least on continuous reads or writes. It is clearly true that it will matter LESS than it used to. But seems unlikely this will be as fast as a true 7,200rpm 2TB drive which we will presumably see from somebody else before long.
Wait for a full benchmark at least. Sounds like one of the above--Hot Hardware, Storage Review (or AnandTech or ExtremeTech)--will have one up before long.
yea its defiantly a NEED for me, I'm running out of space quick and its scary cuz i have a fear of HDD failure and no where to store more videos. but this price is steep. no money to do the shit i need to do.
wait till those 2TB SDXC cards come out, thats gonna be ridiculous, that wont be till about 3 or so years away but can you imagine the price of them. lol, and that will be the safest way to store anything. but by the time those cards came down in price, thats gonna be the best bet