WD 2TB Caviar Green Monster Drive Preview

Late last week Western Digital briefed us on their forthcoming release of a new addition to their Caviar Green family of hard drives.  No we're not talking some sort of exotic sushi or cracker-bound fish egg here either but rather a new, rather humongous and environmentally more friendly hard drive from WD, that can be considered an "industry first".  Today marks the day that standard rotational media breaks the 2TB barrier.  Let's spell that out a bit more clearly again here; T-W-O full Terabytes of SATA-based storage on a single, standard 3.5" hard drive.  Those of you on the consumer side of the market, hording gigs of music, movies, pictures and other media just got a bunch more breathing room to play with.  And those of you in the enterprise space now have a new option to consider with respect to bulk, low-cost, power-efficient storage.  Perhaps that rack just got a little smaller or the need to cool it a little less?

Today Western Digital is announcing their WD20WEADS drive, otherwise known as the WD Caviar Green 2.0TB.  With 32MB of onboard cache and special power management algorithms that make use of that cache to balance spindle speed and transfer rates, the WD Caviar Green 2TB claims a top rung spot on the density-per-square-inch and power-efficiency ladder. 

We've had an engineering sample here in house for a few days and have done some preliminary testing on it.  We'll be offering a full performance evaluation with the final revision of this new drive in the coming weeks but we have a sneak peek for you here.  Let's start with the specifications and then we'll take a closer look at the vital signs.

Specs:

 

• Capacity:  2TB (400Gb/sq.in. areal density)
• 32MB cache buffer
• Variable spindle speed
• 3.5-inch form-factor
• 500GB/platter, 4-platter design
• 3Gb/sec SATA with NCQ
• SATA power connector only
• PMR head technology
• RoHS compliant

 

  


Formatted capacity - Windows Vista 32-bit, NTFS partition

 
SANDRA and HD Tach Preliminary Performance - Engineering Sample, Firmware Not Final

A quick glance at the numbers here show this new big-boy Caviar Green drive from WD offering more than competitive performance versus the likes of Samsung's Spinpoint F1 and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 -- both 7200RPM-based products.  HD Tach shows an average read speed of 90MB/s and average writes at 80MB/s.  We'll be digging into performance metrics with other tools like IOMeter in the days ahead but this early view certainly looks good for a disk with this sort of capacity.  We'll be looking at power as well but WD claims this drive drops in somewhere around 7 Watts under read/write load and 5 Watts at idle.  With the ever-increasing demand for bulk storage, this new WD drive offers a smaller carbon footprint as well, with a full 2TB available in a single 3.5" drive.  

You can catch the official press release from WD, here. Stay tuned for the full HH monty with WD's new big-bad Caviar, coming soon. 

Though Vista likes to round the numbers down to 1.81TB, as you can see, there are over 2 trillion bytes of available capacity on this new, freshly formatted hard drive, with 147MB used just for the file system alone.  Below are some quick and dirty performance numbers with HD Tach and SANDRA.  We should underscore that we're testing a pre-release engineering sample here, so performance figures could scale higher as firmware revision are made to the product.

Dang I missing all the news and fun!!!! Again Im using someone,s computer to talk on here! Cant wait till Im back up and running!Got some of you guys email and I appreciate you thoughts and prayers. Just to many finacial problems right now along with some health problems and on top of that my trucks broke down but hopefully I,ll catch up and get back here where I belong.Miss coming here evryday the news and all you guys. Thanks alot see you soon!

For use all the space you need use GPT partition table, not MS-Dos partition table.

I only have about 500GB left on my 1.5TB HD I bought recently, so provided Western digital prices this well, I may have to grab one when they hit the shelves.

Any word on a 2TB Caviar Black version?

No word on the black version yet but MSRP is expect to be $299!

Yeah dependent on the price and my finances at the time I would love to have this drive and still want a 300g Raptor!!Plus a good video card at least a low cost 9800 video card!Hmmm dont want much do I? LOL Well I,ve learned a long time ago patience is a good thing cause I always of course want the fastest an i7 and the new Asus boards, I just need to hang around Raid he,s the one with the money! HA! HA!

Wow, that's looking pretty sweet -- awesome size and great performance (way better than the 1TB Green drives I reviewed a while back) to boot (no pun intended).

Looking great! Seagates probably too busy with their firmware problems to develop their own 2TB drive. I can't wait to see the Caviar Black Version, but $299US is alot!

wow a 2tb drive thats nice!

$299 is cheap considering the SSD prices.

256mb for $495...

oo i was going to get the 1.5tb one, may aswell wait for this

I believe you mean 256 GB there BChase -- two different spectrums though. SSD = performance whereas these "old fashioned" drives are all about huge capacity.

Does anyone know what the RPM will be?

it will be 7200RPM

Were can i find this posted on a reliable web site?

Variable spindle speed. I think like 5400 up to 7200, at least with the 1TB ones.

Yea they wont be over 7200. there is no real need on the bog HD's and it just casuses more ware on the drive. Like bob said 5400-7200rpm will be the speed of them

Char, what is that supposed to mean? Or are you just a standard issue troll?

WD doesn't list that because the spindle speeds vary since it's a green drive and that is governed to reduce power consumption.

Dang, did know you had to be a computer geek to ask a simple question. Just wanted to ready more up on the issue as I have been following Seagate's issue etc. Sorry for being a simple person and looking for a reliable website to do some reasearch on.

Recover, the guy comes to our site and basically says we're not reliable. What would you like me to do? I should have just deleted the comment actually.

Dave_HH:

Or are you just a standard issue troll?

I'm not tryin to make waves or disrespect, just surprised is all.

Dave_HH:

Recover, the guy comes to our site and basically says we're not reliable. What would you like me to do? I should have just deleted the comment actually

Just to clarify: The point I was making is that you're way above name calling.

Sorry then Char. This is the "reliable" site you're looking for then so ask away! :)

i bought a 750GB drive when i built my new PC a few weeks ago, upgraded from a 120 in my old pc

Originally i was thinking that 750GB was going to be way too much, but somebody just posted that they only have 500GB left on a 1.5TB drive.....

what in the world do you have on your hard drive? i am curious what takes up so much space