Western Digital unveils world's first 2TB hard drive.
It turns out 2TB drives were much closer around the corner than we expected, as Western Digital has rocketed forward and become the first hard drive manufacturer to create one, or at least announce it publicly.
Known as the WD20EADS or the ‘WD Caviar® Green™ 2TB,’ the new model features four platters, 32MB of cache, and claims a sustained transfer rate of 100MB/s, which is close to believable for everyday, random access use. Just for kicks, it actually features 398MB on top of the 2TB, but those who like to convert decimal capacity to binary while cleverly sticking with the same unit of measurement will continue to complain these are smaller than advertised.
Rather than a set rotation speed, it uses a system Western Digital calls IntelliPower that consists of a “fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms” which are supposed to save power while producing “solid performance.”
Interestingly, the company is claiming a significantly higher areal density than Seagate’s new platter design, coming in at 400 gigabits per square inch, which is a jump in density of 71Gb over its competition. Nonetheless, the storage potential between the two brands remains the same. Just like Seagate’s claim of 500GB per platter, Western Digital says likewise for its new disks, so they’re presumably either physically smaller in size or some of the platter isn’t used for storage.
Some like to whine about the increasing likelihood of ‘unrecoverable error rates’ occurring on larger drives such as this (a metric that hard drive manufacturers supply). Needless to say, drive failure without backups at this size would suck, but the chance of losing data in this manner is actually quite low. In fact, a bunch of Microsoft researchers have put this measurement to the test and discovered it isn’t a particularly relevant metric after all [PDF]. If you’re still worried about it, this is what file systems such as ZFS were designed for, correcting such errors even on a single drive.
That said, Western Digital’s new drive contains a whole bunch of safety features to fight against any errors, including reduced noise and vibration via an improved seeking algorithm and a more stable motor shaft, now secured at both ends. Additionally, it sports a parking bay for the read/write head so as to eliminate contact with the disks, much like in notebook hard drives. In desktop drives, the heads traditionally rest directly on the platters when inactive and are designed to hover just above when the disks are spinning. It also uses less power, but you can peruse the specs for those green, eco-friendly numbers.
The drive should be hitting stores any day, with a non-local suggested retail price of US$299.
Update: We’ve received word from Western Digital that this is $469 in Australian pesos.
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Anonymous Gibbon
2009.01.29 04:31
Fookin' expansive!