Drive Capacity Goes Wild!
HotHardware.com has a preview of the recently announced Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green Drive. It’s an unbelievable package… A single, regular 3.5” hard drive with TWO TERABYTES of storage. Wow! I need one. OR two. The drive is the WD20EADS drive, and comes with 32 GB onboard cache and power management algorithms balancing transfer rates with spindle speed. This is the most dense/square inch drive out there, and one of the most power efficient, according to Western Digital.
Specifications
- Capacity: 2TB (400Gb/sq.in. areal density)
- 32MB cache buffer
- Variable spindle speed
- 3.5-inch form-factor
- 500GB/platter, 4-platter design
- 3Gb/sec SATA with NCQ
- SATA power connector only
- PMR head technology
- RoHS compliant
Photos are on the HotHardware.com page. The drive shows as 1.81 TB… The drive manufacturers count differently from the rest of us, but you already knew that. They use decimal measurement (1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 GB) while operating systems use a binary counting system, where a gigabyte equals 1,073,741,824 bytes. It’s a geek thing.
Performance
The preview article posts results of a number of tests. At the time of testing, firmware was not in it’s final form, so performance could improve. As it is, the new Caviar Green drive is right up there with Samsung’s Spinpoint F1 and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive. Average read/write speeds are 80MBs/90MBs… average speeds, not peak. WD says the drive uses only 7 Watts while working, and 5 Watts idle.
Pricing
The new drive is set for an official price of $299, which means it will soon be available for less. It’s available now, at “select resellers and distributors“ I want one!
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