Western Digital Launches 2 TB Hard Drive

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.

Latest Videos FromTom's Hardware

"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?

Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.