Is your collection of “media” growing at an exponential rate? Western Digital could have what you’re looking for, as it launches the industry’s first 2 TB hard disk drive.
Western Digital’s first 2 TB hard drive (model WD20EADS) makes use of the company’s 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density), with a set of four to make up the massive capacity. The drive will feature a 32 MB cache.
Most computer users are still running modestly sized drives in comparison to WD’s new offering, and seem to be managing fine. Will there ever be a real need to hit 2 TB when even 1 TB seems like a luxury? Mark Geenen, president of Trend Focus, says more and more people are taking to the roominess.
"While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries," said Geenen. "The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user's insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives."
The new 3.5-inch drive will be a part of the Caviar Green family, which, as the name suggests, is part of WD’s low-energy line. The drive will make use of IntelliPower, which WD says “fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance."
Overall, however, the new 2 TB drive’s specialty is storage, not speed. The WD20EADS should be filling channels and carries with it an MSRP of $299.
What would you do with all that space?