Western Digital to Unveil 2 TB HDD this Week
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.
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.
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!
You can, just use GPT partitions instead of MBR and use the appropriate OS, XP x64, Vista x64, or Vista 32 w/ SP1.
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.
ps. I'd hope for seagate that they've sorted out their drives! I'm known to complain about seagate, but I do believe I have a right to do so at this point. Just today I rebooted a DL180 that I installed thursday last week. And the raid controller greeted me with this text: "Slot 6 Drive Array - Unrecoverable Media Errors Detected on Drives during previous Rebuild or Background Surface Analysis (ARM) scan." That's a brand new array of 1TB seagate drives (hp branded) that I just received last week! so much for huge MTBF ...
Oh well. Could be worse.
I'm curious about that too. Expreview/Fudzilla may have got their info wrong, which is not uncommon. It's not listed on WD's site yet.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-263-WD
But at least we now know it's actually on the way.
And how about using into our motherboards and SATA controller cards? Will it be compatible? My MB is ABIT IP35 Pro. And the SATA controller card should be "Rosewill RC-216 PCI Express eSATA II x 2 / ATA 133 x1 RAID 0/1/0+1/JBOD/ un-RAID mode Controller Card - Retail", with 2 slots.
does anyone know if the prices of the 1TB drives will drop and when?
it would be good to get the 2TB drives but i'd rather wait and c if there are any problems and get a better deal on the 1TB drives instead
and i'm surprised they would release a GREEN version before a BLACK version, any thoughts?
Yay! Now the server is dead! While one drive still has the error mentioned above, the other is completely dead and doesn't even show up in the list or turn on the orange warning light. Guess firmware HPG6 has the same flaw as the official seagate consumer drives.
Gosh I hate seagate.
In other news, the Inquirer says the new 2TB WD drives will cost US$299.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/653/1050653/biggest-hard-drive-world-arrives
Still no sign of the new drives on Newegg