WD ships 7200RPM 2TB desktop hard drives: Caviar Black and RE4
By Darren Murph 
posted Sep 1st 2009 8:00AM
posted Sep 1st 2009 8:00AM
WD® LAUNCHES HIGH-PERFORMANCE, 7200 RPM 2 TB HARD DRIVES FOR DESKTOP AND ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS
WD Caviar® Black™ and WD RE4 Four-platter Hard Drives Set New Benchmarks in High-Feature, High Performance Storage
LAKE FOREST, Calif. – Sept. 1, 2009 – WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced that it is now shipping desktop 7200 RPM 2 TB hard drives and is qualifying with OEMs enterprise-class hard drives based on WD's 500 gigabytes-per-platter technology. The popular family of WD Caviar Black drives, now led by the new 2 TB capacity, is perfect for gaming, high-performance desktop systems and workstations; while the WD RE4 2 TB is suited for servers, network attached storage and storage networks.
High-performance hard drives by an industry leader in performance, WD Caviar Black and WD RE4 2 TB drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 64 MB cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 3 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor to deliver ultimate performance in a maximum-capacity drive.
"WD Caviar Black 2 TB hard drives maximize the features and functionality of power computing applications such as gaming, photo editing, user generated multimedia and video," said Jim Morris, senior vice president and general manager of WD's client storage systems. "With the selection of WD Caviar Black hard drives, WD desktop customers receive the best possible mix of capacity, performance and reliability that is required for intense desktop computing."
"Specifically designed for enterprise-class applications, WD's RE4 2 TB drives incorporate the best combination of features, optimum performance, and superior reliability that customers have come to expect from WD," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage solutions for WD. "Our enterprise products are directly aimed at customers who require additional features and extensive testing that are necessary for high-end enterprise environments."
WD Caviar Black 2 TB and WD RE4 2 TB hard drives feature the following:
- Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
- Dual actuator technology – A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
- IntelliSeek™ – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
- StableTrac™ – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations.
- NoTouch™ ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
Additional Features for WD RE4 2 TB Enterprise Hard Drives
WD RE4 drives feature 1.2 million hours MTBF, Active Power Save™, enhanced RAFF™ technology, multi-axis shock sensor, native command queuing (NCQ), pressure sensors, third generation dynamic fly height, time limited error recovery (TLER), and an extensive and enhanced testing process to ensure long-term reliability for demanding enterprise applications.
Price and Availability
The WD Caviar Black 2 TB GB (model WD2001FASS) hard drives are available through select distributors and resellers. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD Caviar Black 2 TB drive is $299 USD. The WD RE4 2 TB (model WD2003FYYS) drive is currently being qualified by OEMs. Both drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty. More information about WD Caviar Black 2 TB desktop hard drives may be found on the company's Web site at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=733 and the WD RE4 2 TB enterprise hard drives at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=732.
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 designs and produces reliable, high-performance hard drives and solid state drives that keep users' data accessible and secure from loss. Its advanced technologies are configured into applications for client and enterprise computing, embedded systems and consumer electronics, as well as its own consumer storage and media products.
WD was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are marketed to leading OEMs, 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.
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to qualification by OEMs of the WD RE4 2 TB drive. These forward-looking statements are based on current management expectations, and actual results may differ materially as a result of several factors, including: challenges faced in new product development, business conditions generally, and other risks and uncertainties listed in WD's recent SEC filings, including its Form 10-K for the fiscal year 2009. WD undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect new information or events or for any other reason.
My Caviar Black is maybe the best HDD I've owned at the best price, these things are excellent!
Yes they're good. It would be even better if the silly thing didn't go to sleep all the time and then take a few seconds to spin up every 10 mintues.
Does anyone know if it is possible to disable the spindown of this/similar drives? Because the more spindowns and spinups the drive goes through, the faster it's life degrades!
There must be a way to disable this "feature"!
@ Rod, you can change that within the OS.
@ someone, yeah but it's worth it to me, it'll be fun while it lasts.
There's an option in the BIOS to enable spinning down and there's one in the powermanagement options from windows too.
And yeah spinning down/up too often (as in every 5 minutes) probably isn't good but having it spin for 23 hours when you only use it one hour isn't good either, you have to find you sweet spot.
would they work with the newest macBook Pro Unibody Model?
Thank you
So you're asking if a 3.5" desktop hard drive will fit in your laptop?
....
........
answer is the same as every other laptop on the planet.
NO.
Is this the first HDD with 64MB cache?
no, the first 2TB RE4 had 64MB of cache.
What're ya savin'...stranger?
Got some rare things on sale stranger!
These drives get ever larger. Amazing, but they don't get much faster. Still 7200RPM.
Ever larger and larger containers with the same small hole to pour the data in.
Well, making a 10k RPM drive is tricky, because that's something spinning very fast and requires much tighter tolerances and are also more susceptible to getting damaged.
We haven't quite found a storage mechanism that is as reliable as an HDD. SDD's are getting there, but they still have some longevity concerns (performance loss over time, limited number of rewrites). Regardless of how high the number of rewrites and how optimized they are, it still seems to be stopping consumers from adapting them in droves...but that may be due to price.
The same revolutions per minute, combined with a higher data density, *does* result in an overall higher bandwidth.
Besides, at higher rotational speeds you run into heating issues--for that you need something like a Velociraptor (they spin faster but have heat sinks to compensate).
they don't need to increase RPM because increases in platter density provide a larger Read/Write increase, hence why the Samsung Spinpoint F1 and F2's are just as fast as the WD Velociraptor, and the F3's are faster.
It also uses less energy and platter's don't break as easily at lower speeds.
Never heard of a platter breaking, I heard of head crashes though.
2TB drives would be great upgrades for my HP Mediasmart BUT screw those prices... I can wait a couple months for that price to be at least cut in half. My movies and music can arent that much of a priority.
Suitable for Time Capsule expansion?
Fry's 1.5T for $99. 5400rpm Sammy though.
I agree, probably have 4TB versions out by then!
NewEgg shows the RE4 drive as being available, price is $299. They don't have the Caviar Black drive listed yet.
Looks like it pushed the price of the RE3s down though. I've been eying those for a while. 1TB was $189 last I checked now it's $159.
Dr. Webster, the WD 2TB that NewEgg is carrying today is the older RE4-GP model, which is *not* 7200RPM. The 2TB RE4-GP is the enterprise version of the 2TB Caviar Green. The new ones are the 2TB Caviar Black and 2TB RE4, both 7200RPM.
I was considering the 2TB Caviar Black for RAID NAS use since it has the same 5yr warranty as the RE4. But reading this article, I see that the Caviar Black doesn't support some features such as NCQ, TLER, etc. Oh well, I hope the RE4 is not a lot more expensive on the street!
Is that 1.2 Million Hours MTBF a typo? That is about 137 years. How the heck can have test data to show that?
The release does say it's being "qualified by OEMs". That process may still take another 136+ years.
No, it not a typo , they can tell by because thy calculate MTBF... and not test and wait 1.2 Million Hour... I don't need to wait 100 years to tell that something traveling at speed of light will take 100 year to reach a 100 ly away star!
1.2Mhrs MTBF is correct, Seagate quotes about the same for their ESx drives.
It means that if you had 1.2 million of the drives you could run them all for an hour before one would fail.
Or more realistically if you have a large server farm with like 10,000 of these drives you would only have to deal with one failure every 5 days.
I remember paying at least $250 for one of the first 500GB hard drives a few years ago. Just sayin'.
I remember paying $400 for an 8.4 gig SCSI HDD like ten years ago. Welcome to the technology cycle.
just go ahead and call it resident evil 4 edition... itll sell twice as fast.
@mag42987: you have no idea what you're talking about.
I spent a long time on the phone with WD furious that these drives spin down after 10 minutes. The level 2 tech said it is built into the firmware and that you cannot change it. The OS will not do anything for you with these drives.
I am an ultra-loyal WD customer. This made me stop and pause. I was so ticked that they forced me to "be green".
Therefore, I wrote a tiny little program and aptly named it MyB**** (I use it on a MyBook II).
Problem solved. I'm still ticked.
That spinning down isn't a feature of these drives. You're talking about the enhanced power savings on the external drives that have GP (green) drives inside of them.
That lag isn't even all because of the drive inside, the actual enclosure is powering down the drives very aggressively, causing that lag. BTW I agree that it's annoying since sometimes an app will try to access the drive and since it's spun down everything has to wait for the drive to spin back up, but that has nothing to do with the drives in this post.
If the lag really bugs you just take the drive out of that enclosure and either put it in a different enclosure or if you have space put it internally. Personally I don't care enough to swap it since I don't expect high performance out of an external drive largely meant for bulk file storage.
But I still trust WD drives a heck of a lot more than other drives and I've owned plenty through the years. However I think their external enclosures could use some work since they don't always behave right.
Here's hoping the price of Green series will drop more. I don't really need high performance storage drives...doesn't make sense to me when I would only store videos anyway.
I notice they have the large plate on them that samsung started with, interesting, seems samsung taught WD a trick.
They are in trouble now. If they make their drives any bigger they won't be able to sell them in overpriced USB2 enclosures. 2TB is the maximum partition size that USB2 can handle.
eSATA FTW!
What has USB got to do with the size? Or do you mean the filesystem? But yeah it'll be nice when esata gets some more attention.
I think you're confused, pal. The limit has nothing to do with USB 2.0 specs, but the partition system being used.
http://carltonbale.com/2007/05/how-to-break-the-2tb-2-terabyte-file-system-limit/
Read up on MBR vs. GPT partitions. This has been discussed alot. I do agree, though: enclosures are hella overpriced.
USB2 uses Reduced Block Commands (RBC) over SBP-2.
RBC is just SCSI in packets. And it doesn't have a 2TB limit. As mentioned above, perhaps you're thinking of the limitations of the FDISK (MBR) partitioning scheme.
Wwhat: eSATA doesn't fix this, as it isn't a USB issue.
Adding to the above, this can appear to be a file system issue when it is not. Be aware that not all operating systems support GPT. 32-bit XP in particular. If you have Vista or Windows 7 you're fine.
Of course, it's just 2TB on the box. In reality it's probably only 1.7TB (missing a good 300GB, "rounded up")
cool, thanks for the info people. I'll check out the BIOS and Power options.
Cheers :)
After the Seagate firmware/drive failure debacle, I switched to 1 TB Caviar Blacks and haven't looked back. They have been awesome. I love them.
Just in time for my NAS!
The problem? I need 15 of those... :/