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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WillR - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
MP4 is a container, like avi and mkv. DivX and XviD are codecs, like h.264. People use DivX and XviD because they've been around for a decade now. They're stable, and XviD is free. But h.264 is superior in pretty much every way. Most people don't even realize just how efficient it is until they forget what they learned from using the older stuff. It needs a bitrate only about half the other two need to produce the same quality image.Alexstarfire - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
Yea, but the problem with it is the containers that it can be put in. I'm pretty sure you can't put it into an AVI container and that pretty much kills compatibility. And MP4 has it's problems as well. MKV/OGM are quite limited too.BTW, I never use a constant bitrate anyways, it's not very efficient. But I haven't messed with h.264 since it only plays on my computer.... in which case I don't need to convert it anyways.
overzealot - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
You can put any number of streams of video codec with any audio codec with any subtitle file in MKV... how is that limited?neothe0ne - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about, especially since you stated a format is crappy because it is flexible.loldotcom - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
I still enjoy Xvid codecs only because that's the best my Xbox 360 will play, unless I shoot for the less popular WMV-HD codec.Maybe one day the 360's Media Center will support more robust codecs. Maybe.
That being said, I don't think storage is necessarily the limiting factor in the usage of poor video codecs, but rather the bandwidth issue you mention at the end.
It's much easier to retrieve a 700mb file than a 8-25gb one. Though I still prefer to grab a file in WMV-HD if it's available.
Reikon - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
The 360 supports h264 in a MP4 container though there are some limitations. If you're encoding the files yourself, it shouldn't be a problem.Mr Roboto - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
Microsoft doesn't do open source period, unless they are forced too which I hope will be the case. I mean XViD and FFDShow codecs are so common that I can't imagine getting along with out them. God forbid Microsoft adapt early on for once.They would rather spend millions upon millions of dollars to develop some inferior technology than admit the majority of the products they make are simply overpriced bloatware.
I'm a Windows user but man sometimes I just hate MS.
Holly - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
Well, 2TB drive is big enough to store 3 hours of uncompressed HD movie signal (1920x1080 x 8bpc x 25fps) audio included. I doubt we would see breaching 2.5TB in a near future. Not with current technology.Zap - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
I'm looking forward to a non-Seagate choice for drives over 1TB. I usually don't have any complaints about Seagate, but their recent firmware bricking issues is cause for concern.