Western Digital (WD) announced the world’s first two Terabyte (TB) hard drive, which has the highest capacity ever. The device, part of the WD Caviar Green hard drive family, is also said to be environmentally friendly, cool, and quiet. The 3.5-inch drive has a 32MB cache and is built using four platters and based on WD’s 500 GB per platter technology.
Some industry critics cautioned that end customers would prefer to purchase a 1 TB drive. However, there is to date a steady level of roughly 10 percent of consumers who would rather purchase 3.5-inch hard drives which are 1 TB level or higher due to their heightening demand for high definition content.
Western Digital’s third-generation GreenPower technology and the Caviar Green hard drive line can be said to be some of the most profitable product lines in the company’s latest history. WD Caviar Green drives are designed for use with USB, FireWire, and eSATA external hard drives, desktop computers, workstations, and desktop RAID environments.
“Saving power without sacrificing storage capacity is what consumers want, and what many businesses are requiring today. With the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive, customers receive the additional capacities needed to operate today’s highly advanced programs and high-resolution digital files while using less power than typical drives with similar performance and capacities,” said Jim Morris, WD senior vice president and general manager of client systems.
The Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive includes a number of sophisticated technologies, increasing speed, capacity, and performance of the drives. This consists of StableTrac, which fixes the motor shaft at both ends to lower system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for precise tracking through read and write operations. Other technologies include IntelliPower, whichs perfects the stability of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms to provide both considerable power savings and increased performance, and IntelliSeek, which computes optimal seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
The WD Caviar Green 2 TB is available for $299.00 USD and despite tight competition from Seagate with its 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive, which uses four platters and eight heads, Western Digital was able to pushed the bar and pack 33% more storage capacity into an equal space.
TFOT has previously covered several advanced storage technologies, including the upcoming SDXC Memory Card Format thatwill offer up to 2TB of Storage and also increases the read/write speed, reaching a maximum of 104MB per second in 2009 with an eye toward reaching 300MB per second in the future. You can also check out our article about Toshiba’s 256GB Solid State Drive and take A Look Back at CeBIT 2008: Storage and Memory for the side of its digital data storage solutions, more interested in efficient cooling systems and decreasing power consumption rates.
Additional information on WD Caviar Green can be obtained at Western Digital’s website.
