Western Digital introduces 2TB Caviar Green HDD

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 27th January 2009
Comments (40) Stumble
Western Digital introduces 2TB Caviar Green HDD

Western Digital has today announced the WD Caviar Green 2TB hard drive - the industry's highest capacity drive to date.

Western Digital has today announced the WD Caviar Green 2TB hard drive - the industry's highest capacity drive to date.

With four 500GB platters boasting an areal density of 400 Gigabits per square inch, the WD20EADS also features the highest density platters we've seen to date, beating the Seagate 7200.12's areal density of 329 Gigabits per square inch by a significant margin.

The Green features a 32MB cache, a response time of 14.5ms and has claimed data transfer rates of 100MB/sec. Spindle speeds are not disclosed by Western Digital because the drive uses its IntelliPower power saving feature that regulates spindle speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms to deliver a balance of power efficiency and good performance.

The Green 2TB also includes Western Digital's StableTrac technology which, according to the company, secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilises platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations. It's a technology that has been featured on the company's Black series drives for a while.

"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.

Overclockers UK currently has the drive up for pre-order at just over £205 (inc. VAT), which is quite a bit more than you'll pay for two Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB drives, but this will use less power and everything is in one place.

We should have one of the Green 2TB drives in the labs very soon, so stay tuned for the full review. In the meantime, feel free to discuss the news in the forums.
Quote Almightyrastus 27th January 2009, 15:29
Mmmm and just in time for my big storage upgrade
Quote Bauul 27th January 2009, 15:33
Mmm indeed.
Quote Gremlin 27th January 2009, 15:37
dowant

its for sale and shipping in Australia already :D for once we get something early haha , its selling from $374.99 AUD , thats roughtly £161.93

http://www.staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=2tb

its also listing the Mybook mirror edition for $437
Quote wuyanxu 27th January 2009, 15:47
damn it, just bought a 1TB Black a few month ago, they've already doubled its capacity!

okay. must. resist....... must wait for 1TB plater.
Quote yakyb 27th January 2009, 16:00
im planning a server overhaul in november this year i hope these come to a sensible price point by then / pound regains some value
Quote mclean007 27th January 2009, 16:01
Just over £200 isn't bad to be honest. I was expecting more like £300 for the first 2TB drive, then dropping to under £200 in 3 months or so.
Quote perplekks45 27th January 2009, 16:05
Stop it goddamnit! I'm still on 2 x 120 GB and 1 x 250 GB! I feel cheap now...
Want! It! NOW!
Quote Gremlin 27th January 2009, 16:08
£205? man you guys are getting ripped off LOL it'd be cheaper to buy it here and ship it! hahaha
Quote Whalemeister 27th January 2009, 16:14
Mmmm, I want...
Quote Singularity 27th January 2009, 16:17
Too much money. Oh, and, I don't trust WD any more... not after all their failed drives I had/handled.
Quote biebiep 27th January 2009, 16:19
*sigh*
What if it crashes? :(

2TB's, gone in an instant...
Quote SnowCat 27th January 2009, 16:45
You can get 2*1.5tb Seagates for amost the same money (£216)
Quote Jenny_Y8S 27th January 2009, 17:01
I'm OK, I've just picked up 6 1TB Samsungs for my new i7 / 285 rig. It's just such a shame the other 4TB in the house will be spread over so many smaller drives making them pretty much pointless.
Quote B1GBUD 27th January 2009, 17:16
SOLD!!

Now, where do I sign?
Quote mclean007 27th January 2009, 17:40
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gremlin
£205? man you guys are getting ripped off LOL it'd be cheaper to buy it here and ship it! hahaha
Thanks for that illuminating comment. £205 includes 15% sales tax, which partially explains why quoted prices tend to be higher in the UK than in (say) the US, where prices are quoted before sales tax. Also the pound has been utterly hammered in the FX market recently - £205 doesn't go very far in the international currencies market these days.
Quote mclean007 27th January 2009, 17:41
Quote:
Originally Posted by biebiep
*sigh*
What if it crashes? :(

2TB's, gone in an instant...
You do backup, right?
Quote Volund 27th January 2009, 18:17
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
You do backup, right?

eh, backups are for wimps, real men pray to Christ their porn doesn't go bye bye
Quote Gremlin 27th January 2009, 18:22
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
Thanks for that illuminating comment. £205 includes 15% sales tax, which partially explains why quoted prices tend to be higher in the UK than in (say) the US, where prices are quoted before sales tax. Also the pound has been utterly hammered in the FX market recently - £205 doesn't go very far in the international currencies market these days.

the quoted price here includes GST (about 10%) aswell so im just surpised is all considering generally EVERYONE else gets cheaper prices than us for stuff even after they include their taxes
Quote biebiep 27th January 2009, 18:40
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
Quote:
Originally Posted by biebiep
*sigh*
What if it crashes? :(

2TB's, gone in an instant...
You do backup, right?

Yeah, so i have to buy another one "just to be sure"


I'd rather get some serious RAID5 action going with 750GB's :)
Quote HourBeforeDawn 27th January 2009, 19:43
oh ya two of these are going on my list for my HTPC build ^_^
Quote mrb_no1 27th January 2009, 20:11
awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww crap..... my 1.5tb seagate came today, dammit. ah well i figured 2tb might be a while as seagate only announced that they had the ability to make them a few weeks ago, oh well, atleast the price of those wd's is high enough to make me feel better!

peace

fatman
Quote samkiller42 27th January 2009, 22:00
Theres a review on this from TR already: http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2009/01/27/Western-Digital-Caviar-Green-2TB/p1
Not bad, 8 out of 10 score

Sam
Quote Glider 27th January 2009, 22:03
Quote:
Originally Posted by biebiep
Yeah, so i have to buy another one "just to be sure"


I'd rather get some serious RAID5 action going with 750GB's :)

RAID is no Backup... Epic Fail!
Quote Omnituens 27th January 2009, 23:06
Wake me up when a 2TB drive CAN ACTUALLY HOLD 2TB.
Quote Jipa 27th January 2009, 23:07
Wouldn't mind having a couple of these mirrored.. Would sort out my storage issues for a couple of weeks.

My 250 GB with all the images (some of which are only there due to messed up permissions) started making the clicking sound of death and made me pull the trigger on some NAS-solution... It's a slow burning stuff, but the trigger has definitely been pulled already ;)
Quote 500mph 28th January 2009, 00:48
When will the Caviar Black or RE editions come out?
And when can I get one for free?
Quote Cobalt 28th January 2009, 01:11
Quote:
Originally Posted by Glider
Quote:
Originally Posted by biebiep
Yeah, so i have to buy another one "just to be sure"


I'd rather get some serious RAID5 action going with 750GB's :)

RAID is no Backup... Epic Fail!

What do you want? Backing up 2TB is no mean feat. For personal usage RAID 5 is perfectly adequate. I don't have any form of backup but my last disk failure was a 7.85GB deathstar back in the day.

EDIT: I am awaiting a spinpoint F1 which will become my main drive and then my current drives will become the backup. ATM I have 4 drives totalling 530GB, my problem is that the 250GB WD doesn't like hibernating under windows for some reason which is what prompted the upgrade.
Quote metarinka 28th January 2009, 01:34
I'm still quite perplexed by the apparent demand for storage on a consumer level. I'm an avid gamer, have both legitimate installs and ISO's plus a good few hours of movies and a few Gigs of mp3's and I've yet to fill my raptor or 500gig HDD.

Eventually I plan on moving to 1tb, but I feel like data storage is out pacing consumption. I mean 1 TB is hundreds of hours of video, days of music and countless iso's do we really need that much digitial stuff? (note this all goes out the window if you do content production)
Quote outlawaol 28th January 2009, 01:54
Now my RAW files will have a place to frolic, like all free data should be.... I had a feeling that WD had something up its sleeve, with seagate and the likes releasing there 1.5's. WD just reinforces my faith in them once again.

:)
Quote perplekks45 28th January 2009, 02:56
I can see why we need the space. In my computer I have, as mentioned earlier, 2 x 120 and 1 x 250 GB. Not too much I have to say. I'll take 1 of the 120 GB HDs out and put it in an external case for my MP3s... yes, I need that much space. The rest is already on a 500 GB external just because it makes it easier for me and my girlfriend to share the content. Problem right now is, the 1 month old 500 GB drive is almost full already. Maybe I should've never showed her how to use BitTorrent and where to find her favorite TV shows. ;)

I'd love to have a NAS but good ol' money spoils the fun as usual. In total, including both her and my laptop, we have almost 1.5 TB yet I'm constantly short of space. :| I think it's time for a NAS... :(
Quote Glider 28th January 2009, 05:52
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cobalt
What do you want? Backing up 2TB is no mean feat. For personal usage RAID 5 is perfectly adequate. I don't have any form of backup but my last disk failure was a 7.85GB deathstar back in the day.
You have 2TB of highly important stuff? Only backup the things you can't afford to lose. This doesn't include music and movies...

You'll understand when you have a filesystem corruption on your shiny RAID 5 array that RAID != backup...
Quote Joe 28th January 2009, 06:07
Your normal user will hardly have 2TB of "important" data but nonetheless data is data. What might seem unimportant at first can turn into a personal delima and inconvience of epic proportion - once it is lost for good. So the only alternative solution would be to create a mirror with these bad boys to reduce hardware failure. I rather stay away from huge HDs like these unless i can afford to run them in some form of hardware RAID configuration. I would go crazy to loose all my virtual machines in one swoop. At one point I lost about three virtual machines and it was a huge issue getting them all rebuild (Maybe should have made a backup of the virtual machines :p )
Quote [USRF]Obiwan 28th January 2009, 09:12
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volund
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
You do backup, right?

eh, backups are for wimps, real men pray to Christ their porn doesn't go bye bye

ROFL this is gold!
How do you backup 2 terabyte anyway...

on 425 4.7GB DVD's
on 100 20GB BlueRay's
on 125 16GB memorysticks
Quote Journeyer 28th January 2009, 11:39
[QUOTE=[USRF]Obiwan]
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volund
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
You do backup, right?

How do you backup 2 terabyte anyway...


I'm guessing tapes would be appropriate. Slow as hell, but gets the job done.
Quote Gareth Halfacree 28th January 2009, 11:46
Quote:
Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan
ROFL this is gold!
How do you backup 2 terabyte anyway...

on 425 4.7GB DVD's
on 100 20GB BlueRay's
on 125 16GB memorysticks
Or on a single WD 2TB hard disk in an external caddy, updated however frequently you want and kept off-site at all other times. Job done.
Quote neonplanet40 28th January 2009, 11:56
Quote:
Originally Posted by [USRF
Obiwan]
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volund
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
You do backup, right?

eh, backups are for wimps, real men pray to Christ their porn doesn't go bye bye

ROFL this is gold!
How do you backup 2 terabyte anyway...

on 425 4.7GB DVD's
on 100 20GB BlueRay's
on 125 16GB memorysticks

Or just buy another 2TB hard drive.... lol :P
Quote Volund 28th January 2009, 13:22
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gareth Halfacree
Or on a single WD 2TB hard disk in an external caddy, updated however frequently you want and kept off-site at all other times. Job done.

lol, I always wondered why we had a 750GB mybook in the garage
Quote sad panda 28th January 2009, 20:15
the hard drive is really really great .... FOR PORN

I’ve got a sata 2 connection so i don’t have to wait ... FOR PORN

There's always some new sector, .... FOR PORN

I browse all day and night ..... FOR PORN

It's like i’m browsing at the speed of light .... FOR PORN

Why you think the hard drive was born? ... PORN PORN PORN

I’m glad we have this new technology .... FOR PORNn

Which gives us untold opportunity .... FOR PORN

Right from you own desktop ... FOR PORN

You can research browse and shop
Until you’ve had enough and your ready to stop... FOR PORN

Grab your dick and double click ... FOR PORN
Quote Volund 28th January 2009, 20:21
Quote:
Originally Posted by sad panda
the hard drive is really really great .... FOR PORN
snip

Bill Watkins, CEO Seagate Technology-
"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."
Quote sad panda 28th January 2009, 21:07
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volund

Bill Watkins, CEO Seagate Technology-
"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

Too bad that guy got fired. He sounds like a hoot to have around.
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