WD® Launches Industry’s First 2 TB Hard Drives

Weatern Digital Announces 2 TB Hard Drive

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced the first 2 terabyte (TB) hard drive - the world’s highest capacity drive and the latest addition to WD’s popular, environmentally friendly, cool and quiet, WD® Caviar® Green™ hard drive family. This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD’s industry-leading 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) with 32 MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2 TB.

"While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries" said Mark Geenen, President of Trend Focus. "The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user’s insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives"

Yes! Now I can stop cleaning out my hard drive! Looks like WD is calling it the Caviar Green 2 TB. Price should be $299 which makes this a steal! Monitor this page for availability. I wonder how long it will be before we can buy these babies?

Yeah well, unless it comes preformatted (which it probably doesn't), don't plan on using it for a while. Format time has got to be nuts on one of those things. That's one reason I stick to smaller drives. Not to mention that's just too many eggs in one basket.

Originally posted by Amaxium
Weatern Digital Announces 2 TB Hard Drive

I wonder how long it will be before we can buy these babies?

I wonder if they will be the same junk as is being offered in the rest of the industry. I just replaced 'the boy's' hard drive...3 yrs old...and I was told that's the expected life-span these days. Maybe it's 500gig, but it's 500 gig of crap.

Comments? Will these be the gold standard, or the same old story?

I am not a huge fan of Western Digital. What I am excited about is when the 2TB version comes available in the Seagate Barracuda. Right now they have the 1.5 TB. Seagate is a hard drive name I trust above all other brands.

Despite the allure of being able to store 2Tb of data on a single drive, the $299 price tag seems a bit steep. Though I'm sure that will come down over time much as other large drives have shortly after hitting the market. In the meantime, I think I'd just go with multiple 1 - 1.5Tb drives.

Actually, I saw a 1Tb Seagate SATA-300 drive for $99 just yesterday. Looks like I'll be filling one of three remaining slots with one of those babies... two, if the wife money allows me.

By the way, Amaxium...
Seagate took over Maxtor, which was always my drive of choice... lowest failure rate of any brand I've dealt with. Western Digital, on the other hand, ....

[edit on 29-1-2009 by 12m8keall2c]

Western Digital and Seagate are easily the best brands in the hard disk manufacturing business. Very happy Maxtor drivers have been discontinued, in thousands of reviews, averaged, they have by far came out the worst.

As for the 2TB technology, it's good - if you use it. Don't waste your money. I like larger hard drives, because by virtue of basic geometry they are faster. As for me, I'll stick with my 300gb Western Digital VELOCIRAPTOR.

I wonder if they will be the same junk as is being offered in the rest of the industry. I just replaced 'the boy's' hard drive...3 yrs old...and I was told that's the expected life-span these days. Maybe it's 500gig, but it's 500 gig of crap.

Maxtor?

Expected life span is not three years and it never will be. New drives have a expected Mean Time Between Failure of 1.2 million hours. If we assume the design life is a short five years, as is the warranty on new drives, then, if we replace it every five years, only one drive would fail in 136 years. That's 24/7 use, probably at 120F (50C) continuous operation too. A more realistic expectation for a single drive is 6 to 10 years.

www.dailytech.com...
(Most people don't know what actual MTBF is and how to interpret it)

You got unlucky; if you think you can do better, start your own company. If you don't want to loose data, run a RAID 1 setup.

[edit on 29/1/2009 by C0bzz]

Originally posted by C0bzz

I wonder if they will be the same junk as is being offered in the rest of the industry. I just replaced 'the boy's' hard drive...3 yrs old...and I was told that's the expected life-span these days. Maybe it's 500gig, but it's 500 gig of crap.

You got unlucky; if you think you can do better, start your own company. If you don't want to loose data, run a RAID 1 setup.

Thanks for the info. Funny thing is I talked to another techie who agreed with the 3-yr figure, and said nobody wants quality, everybody is looking for size. (I think we were still talking hard drives), but he recommended raid-1 as well. It was a new Seagate that went in.

Going to watch for that 2TB to go mainstream...time to replace my P-3.

I'll hang around for the SSD to become standard.