Western Digital shipping high-speed 2TB hard drive

After releasing relatively low-performance 2TB hard drives a few months ago, Western Digital announced Tuesday that it's now shipping high-performance versions of these top-capacity drives.

The WD RE4 drive

(Credit: Western Digital)

The new drives are the WD Caviar Black and the WD RE4. According to the company, the former is designed for desktops while the latter is suited for servers and network storage devices.

These two new hard drives are based on WD's 500GB-per-platter technology. They both combine 7200rpm spin speed, 64MB cache, dual-stage actuator technology, SATA 2 (3Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor.

(Dual actuator technology is a head-positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track. The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.)

Other features of the two drives include:

• IntelliSeek, a technology that calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
• StableTrac, a mechanism that makes sure the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations.
• NoTouch, a ramp-load technology that keeps the recording head from ever touching the disk media to significantly reduce the wear and tear of the recording head and media as well as provide better drive protection in transit.

In addition, the WD RE4 2TB enterprise drive features 1.2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF) and other power-saving, speed-enhancing, and fail-proofing technologies.

The WD Caviar Black 2TB (model WD2001FASS) drive is available now for $299. The WD RE4 2TB (model WD2003FYYS) drive is currently being qualified by OEMs. Both drives are covered by a five-year, limited warranty.

[tyshockner]

The price seems steep given the fact I could walk into Best Buy right now and get 2 1TB drives for less than $299.

I'll wait till it is cheaper.

[Jack K1]

Go online and you can order two 1.5TB drives for under $299.

[ibeetle]

$299 is retail. Online already has them for less than $250. So the price is not as bad as it seems. Of course you are paying a bit more for the connivance of having a tremendous amount of storage in one drive in one drive bay instead of multiple drives taking up multiple bays. It is all about efficiency; Besides the price is high because it is new. In six months it will be well below $200.

[Gandalf62]

It's all about how much storage you can have in your machine... for example, right now, I've got a Mac Pro with 5.5TB (the 1TB drive from Apple, and 3 1.5TB Seagate drives), but with these babies, I will be able to have 8TB in the machine, without any messy cables, external slower drives, etc. :-)

[Jack K1]

WD has excellent customer service, too.

I bought a 1TB USB external drive from them with two 500GB platters years ago, and WD replaced it when it failed after 12 months - ZERO hassles. They even replaced the replacement when *it* failed after 12 months - still, no hassles! After another 12 months or so, *that* replacement failed, but I decided to forgo another replacement and enjoyed smashing the device to pieces with a sledge hammer instead. The hammer didn't affect performance at all - except the little blue light won't come on at all now. Really, I suppose it functions better now that I've removed any doubts about my ability to store data on it.

[alegr]

Looks like the drives were overheating.

It would appears to me that that WD's hard drives are only good for 12 months. The "excellent customer service" is at the expense of reliability and durability of the hard drives.

I would rather prefer to have no problem with the drives in the first instance. You only need customer service when the product you bought have problems.

[Overtkill-UD]

This is old news. NewEgg.com has had them for a while now.

I agree with the above post in that 2 1TB drives are cheaper. But remember that prices are always a lot higher on new hardware. 2 1 TB drives are better in the sense that you can can take the added advantage of configuring them in a raid array. Just be sure to get the Enterprise/Raid Edition version of the drives as Western Digital themselves will tell you. Apparently this has something to do with having a deep recovery cycle either on the drive or the SATA II controller.

I bet having that 64MB cache on the new drives is nice! :)

[Get_Bent]

No, Newegg has NOT had them at all. Newegg has been selling the 2TB Caviar Green and RE4-GP drives. The Caviar Black series (and RE4 version) has higher performance and better throughput than the Green drives.

[SactoGuy018]

It sounds like a great idea but there is one problem: once you exceed the 64 MB memory cache on the drive you're still limited in terms of long-term write and read speeds due to the 7200 rpm spindle speed. How about bumping up the spindle speed to 10,000 rpm or eventually 12,000 rpm, which will make a big difference in terms of steady read and write speeds.

[alegr]

You can have 10K or 15K rpm drives. But in much smaller density. If used in a high performance array, these 2TB drives are intended to be the last tier, behind higher speed lower capacity drives.

[Randys2cents]

This price sounds great when I remember paying $650.00 for a 9GB drive ten years back!

[gggg sssss]

you are young. I remember paying 1200 for a 500 mb ESDI drive for an old Compaq desqpro14 years ago

[John Slider]

Whose talking youg, I remember paying $600.00 for my first 10 meg hard disk, Yes, 10 meg

[John Slider]

I remember paying $600.00 for my first 10 meg hard drive, Yes, that was 10 megs.... :)

[alegr]

Dual actuator technology might make feasible parallel reading from multiple heads, which is often asked for.

In a single actuator drive, there is no way to align two heads on the same cylinder simultaneously.

[Mr. Dee]

I'm waiting on the 5 TB disk.

[Dango517]

7200 is not high speed 15000 rpm is high speed. 7200 rpms is more or less the standard these days. The 64 MB cache is impressive and will boost this drives performance.

Perhaps the big question being why? I suppose a few video or music collects might use this much space and certainly the corporate world can use them but for most this is simply over kill in drive storage. The real deal is, most common PC users need more RAM to side step the hard drive all together or 15000 RPM drives as a minimum to improve PC performance. Besides the maintenance on these drives will take hours, many hours in fact (possibly 5+ hours).

Lets face it these are corporate drives and are of little interest to the average PC user here on Cnet.

[skrubol]

I just received 2 1.5TB drives for my HTPC. I was very disappointed though to confirm that one of the channels of my onboard SATA controller is bad, so I'm limited to 4 SATA drives in that PC until I upgrade the motherboard (don't feel like adding another controller card when I plan on upgrading in a few months.)

[gggg sssss]

2 tb is nice, until it crashes. Then you lose evrything. What do you back it up to? another such drive is the only answer that makes sense.

[John Slider]

I remember paying $600.00 for my first 10 meg hard drive, Yes, that was 10 megs.... :)

[telcomr]

I backup with a 2 TB WD MyBook. It may not be fast but it works.