| Monday, January 12 2009 |

Western Digital (WD), seems to have matched rival Seagate's per-platter storage density mark, with its 500GB platter technology. What's more, WD is planning to release a quad-platter hard drive totaling two terabytes of unformatted capacity before Seagate could achieve that feat with its Barracuda 7200.12 series. Seagate was the first to come out with a 1.5TB hard drive with four 375GB platters.
The 2TB hard drive by WD (model: WD20EADS) lists under the company's Caviar Green series. It makes use of a 32 MB cache. Its access time is rated at 8.9ms, though its spindle speed is variable, between 5400 and 7200 rpm. The variable speed brings in power savings. It uses the standard SATA II interface. European online retailer Czech Computer started listing the drive, though its price isn't announced just as yet.
Sources: Czech Computer, Expreview
The 2TB hard drive by WD (model: WD20EADS) lists under the company's Caviar Green series. It makes use of a 32 MB cache. Its access time is rated at 8.9ms, though its spindle speed is variable, between 5400 and 7200 rpm. The variable speed brings in power savings. It uses the standard SATA II interface. European online retailer Czech Computer started listing the drive, though its price isn't announced just as yet.
Sources: Czech Computer, Expreview
User comments
Nice, gotta love how fast this HDD market is moving. These will likely be around $100 by May. Hopefully they will have less problems than the 1.5s from Seagate seem to be having.
2tb is too much of data to loose for me. Would be a good junk dump drive tho. But 1Tb should be enough for me, bring those out
Been waiting for this. Time to upgrade my 2TB (1TB+1TB RAID0) array.
by: wolf2009That's why there's raid 1, etc :)
2tb is too much of data to loose for me. Would be a good junk dump drive tho. But 1Tb should be enough for me, bring those out
They better not have the same crappy perf. as the current hippie HDDs. Waiting for it to spin up is

by: farlex85
Nice, gotta love how fast this HDD market is moving. These will likely be around $100 by May. Hopefully they will have less problems than the 1.5s from Seagate seem to be having.
All thanks to perpendicular recording. Perpendicular recording is to hard drives as a processor is to an abacus. It is a monumental step forward as demonstrated by the rapid increase of capacity in recent years.
Does the 500GB / Platter give that much performance increase over 320GB ?
It should lower access/read times by a little since with say a 1TB drive with two 500Gb platters instead of 3 375Gb platters doesn't have to read across 3 platters.
weird, i thought seagate was going to be the first with 2tb drives

