Rumors first appeared about two weeks ago that Western Digital planned on releasing 1.5TB and 2TB hard drives. As of today, the rumors are official. WD is introducing its third-generation GreenPower drive series and WD manages to reach the two terabyte milestone first. The latest Caviar Green (WD20EADS) hits the 2TB mark with four 500GB platters, each rated with an areal density of 400Gb/in².
Of course, the first question that comes to mind is spindle speeds. Western Digital does not comment on exact rotational speeds with the GreenPower drives, only to say that it is close to 5,400RPM. While that is important for some, we see it a bit differently as this latest Green's high areal density, combined with 32MB of cache, and new electronics will provide very good performance.
This particular series of Green Drives features an update to WD's Intelligent Drive Technology. 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; 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.
Western Digital says the 2TB Caviar Greens will ship late this week, so expect to see them at e-tailers soon. WD's suggested list price for the drive is $299, which is certainly more than two of their top performing Caviar Black 1TB drives . However, you end up with a single drive featuring improved acoustics and power consumption along with performance that should satisfy most users. The 1.5TB drive should ship later this quarter. We decided to take a break from the firmware carousel and will provide an in-depth review of the Caviar Green 2TB drive once our retail unit arrives.
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araczynski - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
"Of course, the first question that comes to mind is spindle speeds"Nope, the first thing that comes to mind is "how much".
:) unless of course the sentence was meant to be tied to the previous paragraph, rather than starting its own.
Origo - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
I agree. I prefer less a noisy and lower power consumption/temperature HDD..araczynski - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
more importantly though, i was just about to get a 1.5tb, but have been hesitant with all the issues that the seagate unit has been having. hope the new wd 1.5 will at least spark a further price cut now that there's competition.Alexstarfire - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
I haven't had any issues with my 1.5TB Seagate drive. Didn't they release a fix for the broken fixed firmware?Zak - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
Yup, me neither. Maybe mine have the updated firmware. Also, it's not the capacity of the hard drives but their speed is the biggest issue for me. Capacity grows faster than speed. We really need faster storage, not bigger.Z.
Doormat - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
It wont be long before you have both. By 2011 I can see a 3.5" HDD coming with a 450MB/s 128GB SSD and a single platter 1TB HDD. You'll only have 1 SATA 3.0 cable hooked up because the port multiplier and other connections are inside the HD. Your system gets installed on the SSD and your "media" goes on the spindle drive.gipper - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
I wish this drive had been out when I started building my Windows Home Server. I'd love to have a landing pad that big and a 1T secondary drive.I think storage is going to explode in the near future with all of the ways to collect digital video and pics, and now you can view them through your TV with TiVo, Xbox, PS3, etc.
davepermen - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
The Landing-Pad issue got resolved with an update around december, i think. It shouldn't matter anymore. It got fixed around 3 days after i installed the 1.5tb as systemdisk (for having a big landing pad.. :)).Einy0 - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
I agree storage capacity is becoming a big deal, regardless of performance. With the inevitable rise of BD, storage space will be critical. I'd like to see systems equipped with primary 500GB SSDs and secondary storage capacity via 2TB plus storage drives. There is no need for blazing fast storage for digital media. ie... MP3, XVID, MP4 AVC etc... With larger storage available at reasonable prices there is no reason to not encode music in Lossless formats. To encode XVID, etc with higher bitrates and 480P, 720P, 1080P. With Quadcores priced to sell and stream processing a reality, high bit rate, high res video should be come the standard. Throw in the fact that nice 22" and 24" LCDs are a great value. Now if we can only get reasonable prices on super fast internet connections... Or perhaps if Verizon speeds up the deployment of FIOS.Alexstarfire - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
God, MP4 is such a crappy format it's not even funny. When I tried converting some video files into MP4 format so I could play it on my phone do you even know how many different MP4 choices I had? There were at least 12 different MP4 choices I had, and only 1 works for my phone. If it's for your computer though all the formats should work, but for portable devices it's a biatch. If a device says it supports XVID or DIVX then it supports ALL versions of them, not just one or two. I think that's why people use them so much. WMV is also a horrible format, but for vastly different reasons.