Western Digital to Unveil 2 TB HDD this Week

News
By Gavin Steacy
published

With High Definition content being stored on hard drives more and more frequently, and the latest games having increasingly large installations, hard drive space fills up quickly. Western Digital comes to the rescue with the first 2 TB hard drive expected to launch later this week.

The WD20EADS will be part of Western Digital's Caviar Green series. It will have 32 MB of cache, a seek time of 8.9ms and will run at either 5400RPM or 7200RPM. The drive is expected to have four 500 GB platters.

Information about the WD20EADS first appeared when online retailer Czech Computer listed it on their website back in December 2008, however they have not indicated any stock up to this point.

MSRP is not yet known, but rumours are pointing to retail prices of about $210-240, making it slightly more expensive than a pair of drives in the lower end of the 1TB price range. We'll know the price soon enough when the drive hits the shelves later this week.

Gavin Steacy
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26 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Pei-chen
    Be aware that Intel storage controllers and windows do not recognize volumes over 2TB so if you RAID 0 two 2TB drives, the max single volume is 2TB and you have to partition the drive in order to use the other 2TB.
    Reply
  • Blessedman
    Honestly I didn't know that, I run 4 500gb drives in a raid0 pulling just 1.8TB (I guess I am safe lol). I paid 60$ per drive and get performance just under some of the lower end SSD's. My real reason for commenting though is instead of a 2TB drive why not another 1TB drive with say 16gb of "cache". Come up with cache management software that will allow applications or OS to be stored there. I know these Hybrids are on their way, but come on they should be here by now... Especially knowing they basically hit the ceiling of main stream capacity.
    Reply
  • p05esto
    Glad to see the 2TB, my NAS fills up everytime I get a larger drive... and I really don't want to RAID stuff together if I can help it. 2TB makes me drool. Hope Windows 7 allows for larger drives than 2TB, how was that missed in Vista (assuming post above is true)?
    Reply
  • "Be aware that Intel storage controllers and windows do not recognize volumes over 2TB so if you RAID 0 two 2TB drives, the max single volume is 2TB and you have to partition the drive in order to use the other 2TB."

    How is that? I currently have a 2.5TB RAID 0 partition on an ICH9R. I can't boot from it, yes, but I still can store on it without extra partitioning.
    Reply
  • stuckintexas
    Every Windows OS from XP 64-bit on supports GPT in some form, which allows for volumes over 2TB. On an earlier version of Win7, I had an array formatted in GPT that was 12TB. You can also get RAID cards that support variable sector size. With a 4k VSS, you can get 16TB in a single volume under any OS.
    Reply
  • killerb255
    Once you go over 2 TB, you have to use the GPT partitioning scheme.

    Caveats to GPT:
    1) Can't boot from it unless you have an EFI motherboard. EFI is the successor to the BIOS.
    2) Have to have Windows Vista, Server 2008, or Windows 7 to boot from GPT. Macs already use EFI and GPT. The Linux community is probably on top of this already.
    3) You can have a GPT data drive in Windows XP x64, Server 2003 x64 (and maybe x86 as well), Vista, Server 2008, and 7. You don't need an EFI motherboard for this. 32-bit XP DOES NOT support GPT!
    Reply
  • gwolfman
    Pei-chenBe aware that Intel storage controllers and windows do not recognize volumes over 2TB so if you RAID 0 two 2TB drives, the max single volume is 2TB and you have to partition the drive in order to use the other 2TB.You can, just use GPT partitions instead of MBR and use the appropriate OS, XP x64, Vista x64, or Vista 32 w/ SP1.
    Reply
  • aevm
    These drives will probably have 2*10^12 bytes, i.e. 1.819 TB. Since that's under 2 TB, does it mean I can use one of those in XP 32-bit? I don't need to boot from it, just for storage.
    Reply
  • bf2gameplaya
    aevmThese drives will probably have 2*10^12 bytes, i.e. 1.819 TB. Since that's under 2 TB, does it mean I can use one of those in XP 32-bit? I don't need to boot from it, just for storage.
    Yes, you can use a 2TB (NTFS) drive with Windows XP Pro 32-bit.

    The greater than 2TB HDD with Windows XP Pro 32-bit limitation is with the partition tables size in the MBR, not with NTFS which can have up to 16TB or even 256TB HDDs depending on cluster size.
    Reply
  • Pei-chen
    I should clear up that I meant a 2TB+ bootable volume.
    Reply