July 1, 2009

Western Digital Debuts First 2TB HD

By Melissa J. Perenson

Published in the May 2009 print edition of PC World Philippines

Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB

$299

www.wdc.com

The  Caviar Green 2TB WD20EADS hard drive from Western Digital boosts the capacity game to a whole new level. This $299 disk can hold two terabytes– it’s the first to do so, and a boon to anyone with a large data archive or media library. Previously, Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drive led in capacity.

This internal unit provides an areal density of 400 gigabits per squar inch on four 500GB platters. And WD bills it as environmentally friendly for its lower power use.

In our PC World Test Center trials, it came in fifth among all hard drives tested, one place better than the 1.5TB Seagate unit. It lagged our performance leaders (the WD RE3 Enterprise 500GB and the WD Velociraptor) on some results– notably, write-intensive disk imaging in WorldBench 6. But on other core metrics, the 2TB drive was competitive. It finished our test for writing files and folders in 112 seconds and handled our test for writing large files in 92 seconds, placing behind the performace leaders by 12 seconds or less.

The drive comes with several WD technologies that, the company says, allow the model to achieve its baance of price and preformance and optimize its inner workings. For example, StableTrac reduces vibrations but securing the motor shaft at both ends, permitting accurate head tracking during read and write operations.

The $299 orice tag may seem high, but at 15 cents per gigabyte, it is fairly competitive with that of other drives. The cost of recovering a ginormous 2TB drive that is dead or damaged, however, could be huge.

That the drive isn’t quite top-of-the-heap performer should not deter people with large data libraries. Nor should it put off digital media enthusiasts. Those users will rightly crave this drive.