Western Digital 2TB Hard drive.
THE CAVIAR GREEN 2TB
Hard drive from Western Digital boosts the capacity game to a new level.
The $299 disk can hold 2 terabytes—it’s the first to do
so, and a boon to anyone with a large data archive or
media library. Previously,Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11
1.5TB drive led in capacity.
This internal unit provides an areal density of
400 gigabits per square inch on four 500GB platters.
And WD bills it as environmentally friendly for its lower power use.
In our PC World Test Center trials, it came in
fifth among all hard drives tested, one place better
than the 1.5TB Seagate unit. It lagged our performance
leaders (the WD RE3 Enterprise 500GB and the WD Veloci Raptor) on some
results—notably, write intensive disk imaging in WorldBench 6. But on other core metrics, the 2TB drive was competitive. It finished our test for writing files and folders in 112 seconds and handled our test for writing large files in 92 seconds, placing
behind the performance leaders by 12 seconds or less.
The drive comes with several WD technologies that,
the company says, allow the model to achieve its balance
of price and performance and optimize its internal workings.
For example, Stable- Trac reduces vibration by securing the motor shaft at both ends, permitting accurate head tracking during read and write operations.
The $299 price tag may seem high; but at 15 cents per gigabyte,
it is fairly competitive with that of other drives.
The cost of recovering a ginormous 2TB drive that is dead or damaged, however, could be huge.
That the drive isn’t quite a top-of-the-heap performer
should not deter people with large data libraries. Nor
should it put o` digital media enthusiasts.
Those users will rightly crave this drive.
PC World [Apr 2009 - Vol 27]
