January 27th, 2009
Western Digital announces 'world's highest capacity drive' at 2TB
Western Digital today announced “the world’s highest capacity drive” at 2 terabytes.
The WD Caviar Green WD20EADS, a 3.5-inch hard drive with 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) and 32 MB cache, can be had for $299.00 USD.
Already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, according to Mark Geenen, President of Trend Focus, in the press release.
The drive is designed for use in USB/FireWire®/eSATA external hard drives, desktop computers, workstations, and desktop RAID environments.
Specs and proprietary tech include the following:
StableTrac, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations; IntelliPower, which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance; IntelliSeek, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration; and NoTouch ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection while in transit.
Shock Operating Shock (Read) 65G, 2 ms Non-operating Shock 300G, 2 ms
Acoustics Idle Mode 25 dBA (average) Seek Mode 0 29 dBA (average) Seek Mode 3 26 dBA (average)
Vibration Operating Linear
20-300 Hz, .75G (0 to peak) 10-300 Hz, 0.008 g² / Hz
Non-operating 5-20 Hz, 0.195 inches (double amplitude) 20-500 Hz, 4.0G (0 to peak)
Electrical Specifications Current Requirements Power Dissipation 7.4 Watts 4.0 Watts 0.97 Watts 0.97 Watts
So: do you think you need a 2TB drive?
Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet.
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