WD's Monster 2TB Caviar Green Drive, Preview Test

MojoKid writes "Today Western Digital is announcing their WD20WEADS drive, otherwise known as the WD Caviar Green 2.0TB. With 32MB of onboard cache and special power management algorithms that balance spindle speed and transfer rates, the WD Caviar Green 2TB not only breaks the 2 terabyte barrier but also offers an extremely low-power profile in its standard 3.5" SATA footprint. Early testing shows it keeps pace with similar capacity drives from Seagate and Samsung."

Comments

Powers of 2

[Hyppy]

It's really only 1800 Gigs.

Re:Powers of 2

[wild_quinine]

It's really only 1800 Gigs.

Ah, the drivemaker's kilobyte...

Re:Powers of 2

[corsec67]

You mean 1800 Gibibytes?

Re:Powers of 2

[pushing-robot]

Yes. Curse those evil companies, trying to replace our God-given units—like Furlongs, Hogsheads, and Binary Thousands—with evil, communist SI units. The fiends will stop at nothing to pollute the American way of life!

Re:Powers of 2

[jedidiah]

Yeah... nevermind units that fit in with what's being measured
or are computationally convenient. What we really need are
arbitrary metrics created by beaurocrats on a power trip.

Re:Powers of 2

[fprintf]

The funny thing is both of my home computers have drives smaller than the missing 200GB from this 2TB drive. I really need to upgrade soon...

Re:Powers of 2

[pushing-robot]

Congratulations. You have just stated that powers of 10 are "arbitrary metrics created by beaurocrats[sic] on a power trip."

Let me explain this in simple terms:

Powers are two are convenient for machines.

Powers of ten are convenient for humans.

It's bad form to present data in an inconvenient format for the user (which, presumably, is human) no matter how "computationally convenient" your algorithm may be. You can use binary calculations all you want behind the scenes, but convert it to a format designed for human comprehension before displaying it to a human.

Re:Powers of 2

[MightyYar]

Your argument would carry more weight if the manufacturers were doing this for the benefit of humans. In fact, they mix units - using the 1024-standard units for cache. Tell me mixing units is friendly! :)

Re:Powers of 2

[sexconker]

Let me explain this is detailed, complicated-for-you, terms.

Exponents are useful for counting possible combinations. Computers are logically binary and quantum. When dealing with storage, we use 1024, because it represents the number of possible configurations of a 10-bit sequence.

2^10 was chosen for convenience - it was close to 1000, which people are used to working with, and it provided a good separation between major units.

1000 was chosen by SI for reasons just as arbitrary, namely providing a good spacing. We have scalar units of 10 (decimeter, decameter, for example), but no one ever says "Go down the road 1.2 deca kilometers".

SI units (major units based on a factor 1000, with shitty units based on 10 for completeness) are for measuring.

Computery units, (major based on a factor of 1024, with minor units based on 2 as the basis), are for counting.

This is why clock speeds use 1000, not 1024. Clock speeds are traditionally measured, and not counted, and they do not operate on a binary quantum system.

This is why data storage is SUPPOSED to be described using 1024, while data transfer is described using 1000.

If you want to get down to it, all SI units are retarded, since the universe is quantum (it is). All measurements are merely inaccurate tools of convenience, and everything should be counted in universal quantums of space (Planck Length? I doubt it, unless it really is tortoises all the way down), time, etc.

To sum it up - SI is not right because it's "official". SI is WRONG for computer science. And if the universe is quantum, SI is technically wrong for everything. Calculus, too.

Re:Powers of 2

[JesseMcDonald]

No, I'm quite sure the OP meant 1800 gigabytes, or about 15.46 terabits.

Established convention is that bytes are measured in binary (powers of 1024), and bits in decimal (powers of 1000). There's no need to introduce ridiculous-sounding terms like "gibibytes".

(Incidentally, I suspect there would be a lot less resistance to these newfangled units if they'd had the sense to pick names people could be expected to say with a straight face...)

Re:Powers of 2

[mmontour]

Your argument would carry more weight if the manufacturers were doing this for the benefit of humans. In fact, they mix units - using the 1024-standard units for cache.

RAM specifications use the 2^x numbering because the device is physically constructed as a square grid of cells with power-of-two numbers of rows and columns. There's a direct mapping between bits on the address bus and the cell that is selected.

In the early days it was convenient to say that 1024 was close enough to 1000, so RAM sizes were quoted in "KB". However, the error in this increases with each step up in size. By the time you get to the TB scale it's no longer a reasonable approximation.

Magnetic storage does not have this constraint. The sector size is (arbitrarily) set at 512 bytes and hard drives usually have an even number of read/write heads, but apart from that there are no powers of two. The number of cylinders on the drive, and the number of sectors per cylinder, are arbitrary.

Communication speeds (e.g. "9600 baud", "100 Mb/s") are also not specified in power-of-two sizes, because they are natively dealing with individual bits and not power-of-two-sized chunks.

Therefore, there is nothing wrong with saying that a drive is "1 TB with 32 MiB of cache". As long as the manufacturer uses the SI and kilobinary notation correctly, users should not complain. Save your anger for the marketroids at WD who come up with features like "IntelliSpeed" in order to sell you a 5400-RPM drive and make you think you're buying a 7200-RPM one.

tl;dr version: Just use the damn GiB/GB notation consistently and get over it.

Re:Powers of 2

[erroneus]

Okay, I suppose you are correct in your view. From now on, a foot is ten inches because a unit of measure not based on tens is inconvenient. After all, the metric system works exactly this way. Also, there will be ten hours per day, ten days in a week and ten weeks in a month... and of course ten months in a year which, for me, makes "December" far less confusing since the Dec in December means ten in the first place.

Yes, that is sarcasm. To me, a unit of measure, no matter how inconvenient, is a unit of measure. You do NOT change the unit of measure. You create a NEW unit of measure.

So to that end, I propose a new unit of measure for hard drives: LTC-KB

This would make the difference between KB and LTC-KB much more obvious. A KB is 1024 bytes. (A Kb is 1024 bits just so you know.) A MB is 1024 KB, or 1024 x 1024 bytes, and a TB is 1024 MB, or 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. A LTC-KB is 1000 bytes, a LTC-MB is 1000 LTC-KB and a LTC-TB is 1000 LTC-MB.

Oh, forgive me for not mentioning earlier, but LTC means "Lie To Consumers."

Re:Powers of 2

[Al Dimond]

SI might be wrong for computer science, but SI prefixes have standard meanings. If we want prefixes that work better for computing (which we may well), then making new ones, just to be clear, is a good idea. Then if SI is wrong you don't have to use it, and you don't confuse everyone by using its terminology to mean something slightly different (which is much worse than using it to mean something very different).

Anyway, the power-of-two units make some calculations easier and many harder. Just because an N-bit MUX has 2^N inputs doesn't mean they'll all be connected to something. You have 4 384-byte memory modules, quick, how many kB? Um, what's 384/1024? 3/8 maybe? Having to mess with mutliplying/dividing by 1024 in the middle of back-of-the-napkin calculations where not every number is a simple power of 2 (even if many of them have lots of 0s at the end in binary, like 384 does) actually does suck unless you just give in and learn your multiplication tables in hex (if I was still doing driver programming I probably would have done just that).

Re:Powers of 2

[HTH NE1]

RAM specifications use the 2^x numbering because the device is physically constructed as a square grid of cells with power-of-two numbers of rows and columns. There's a direct mapping between bits on the address bus and the cell that is selected.

Magnetic storage does not have this constraint. The sector size is (arbitrarily) set at 512 bytes and hard drives usually have an even number of read/write heads, but apart from that there are no powers of two. The number of cylinders on the drive, and the number of sectors per cylinder, are arbitrary.

Now explain flash/solid state memory sizes and the "formatted capacity" of memory.

Re:Powers of 2

[Just Some Guy]

You mean 1800 Gibibytes?

I will never, ever, in my entire life, even once mean "gibibytes".

Re:Powers of 2

[Cowmonaut]

Except in computers. KB does mean Kilobyte in both SI and computer science, but it is NOT SI IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. A side affect of counting in binary and everyone is going to just have to live with it.

Re:Powers of 2

[petermgreen]

Well binary units make sense for the size of solid state memories because they were almost always produced in power of two sizes (for good reasons, if they weren't the address decode logic would be a LOT more complex). Binary kilobytes also made sense for floppies since they were usually an integer number of power of two sized sectors.

And if your OS is already using a measuring system for memory and floppies doesn't it make sense to also use it for hard drives? MS clearly thought so. Unfortunately the hard drive vendors throught differently (whether for technical reasons or because it allowed them to advertise higher capacities is unclear) and so we ended up with two different systems in wide use.

Worse with each unit we go up the discrepancy gets worse. At kilo it was only 2.4% , at terra it's nearly 10%.

Re:Powers of 2

[mdielmann]

Um, yeah, except that just about everything is stored on powers of two. This is as absurd as if hot dogs were sold in packages of 8 (or 1024) and buns were sold in packages of 10 (or 1000). AND they used the same term to describe both, until it got to the point where they could sell significantly less than was expected while using VERY small print to notify us of this change in wording.
There is absolutely NO reason to use base 10 numbering for computer memory of any kind, except that it allows manufacturers to use bigger numbers while selling less. The only mitigating factor is that now that they all do it, at least we're back to comparing apples to apples.

Re:Powers of 2

[mmontour]

Now explain flash/solid state memory sizes and the "formatted capacity" of memory.

At a low level flash chips have a row/column nature similar to DRAM, but there is additional complexity because some operations target a larger "erase block" rather than an individual byte.

Some embedded platforms present a raw interface to the flash memory and require the host operating system to provide support for bad blocks and wear-levelling. These would be specified in "MiB" along with a certain allowable percentage of bad blocks.

However, the more familiar approach (e.g. in a SD card) is to include an embedded microcontroller that presents a logical block interface to the host. This controller skips over the bad blocks, and also needs to use some of the good blocks to keep track of the logical-to-physical block mapping. Here it makes more sense to use SI notation.

I just checked an "8 GB" microSD card and found that it presents a capacity of 7969177600 bytes to the OS (before partitioning). So 0.4% of the rated capacity is not available to me. This is consistent with the typical fine print on the package, e.g. "Some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions, and thus is not available for data storage" (from Sandisk's website). If the manufacturer had sold it as an "8 GiB" card I would be more upset because that would represent a 7.3% capacity loss.

Re:Powers of 2

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

To sum it up - SI is not right because it's "official". SI is WRONG for computer science. And if the universe is quantum, SI is technically wrong for everything. Calculus, too.

No one gives a shit whether your measurement system is 'correct', as long as it's consistent. SI is VERY consistent for a system that spans so many fields. That's why it's better than the US customary system.

This is why data storage is SUPPOSED to be described using 1024, while data transfer is described using 1000.

There's nothing inherent to today's storage technologies that requires power-of-two capacities. We're not even using a fraction of the address space we already have, so sticking to a power-of-two size doesn't have any real benefits.

SI is WRONG for computer science.

Oh, so Computer Science is so important that we get to invent our own units, and use the same names as established SI units? Please. If you want to use binary units because they are convenient, go ahead and do so. But DON'T call them "tera", "giga", or "mega"; these terms already have SPECIFIC meanings and you can't just hijack them.

Re:Powers of 2

[locketine]

Uhhhhhhhhhh..... Kilo = 1000 times the postfix. Period. Shall I reemphasize that? Kilo will always mean 1000 times whatever your base unit is. Computer science needs to follow this rule just like every other freaking discipline on the planet. Do you honestly think CS is the only place where physical constraints suggest using a non 10 based numbering system. Of course not! The SI system is designed to make engineers lives much much easier. How do you expect a mechanical engineer to know that a kilobyte isn't 1000 bytes when it would mean 1000 in everything they ever do that's not related to memory/storage? I had the SI system memorized freshmen year of college and yet a college diploma later I still have problems doing calculations involving transferring data across serial connections because of the misuse of the SI system in relation to storage space. If you want to keep your powers of two change the name of a kilobyte, megabyte, etc. to a non SI name.

Re:Powers of 2

[sexconker]

Everybody else will have a much easier time using 1024 when dealing with computers.

When is it ever a problem other than when people forget the difference? Do morons really need help calculating things? 1024 MB = 1 GB after all. Pro tip: Most computers can do calculations for you.

Memory is byte-addressable, after all.
Clusters for storage are obviously using powers of 2.
Characters are 1 byte. (2 for foreigny-type stuff.)

Asking scientists to dumb it down is retarded.
Asking them to lie to users is retarded as well.

It's only an issue when some moron messes up and needs something to blame their mistake on. What, did you think 0x23 meant twenty-three? Does 777 mean seven hundred seventy-seven? No one ever bitches about hex, octal, or other schemes. It's always decimal cry babies who fucked up a calculation because they were lazy / out of their realm.

You don't see any computer scientists bitching about how they divided by 1024 instead of 1000 and fucked up.

Re:Powers of 2

[MightyYar]

No a terabit would give you 125 gigabytes.

That was quick.

[jcr]

Wasn't it only about a year ago that 1TB drives hit the market?

-jcr

just what I need

[Coraon]

I was worried I would have to start deleting from my *cough* adult movie collection *cough* to make more room

Re:just what I need

[geekoid]

I just leave mine on the internet.

backups

[Reality Master 201]

What the hell do you do to back up your 2TB drive?

That much storage in a single unit seems kind of dangerous.

Re:backups

[Moridineas]

What the hell do you do to back up your 2TB drive?

2 other 2TB drives?

Re:backups

[Xemu]

Another 2TB drive. They're cheap enough to keep a spare around.

The problem with that is of course that mirroring simply mirrors problems on the primary drive to the secondary drive. So you end up with two working drives with broken data on it.

It's the data you want backed up, not the drive.

Re:backups

[timeOday]

That much storage in a single unit seems kind of dangerous.

I never understood this argument. Say you have N drives each with capacity C/N (e.g. C=2TB, N=1 for this new drive, or C=500GB, N=4 as you prefer) and probability P of each drive failing in a given time interval. Your expected data loss is N*P*C/N, which is independent of N. So what's the gain from more drives?

Heck, assume you don't want the hassle of multiple partitions so you use logical volume management to concatenate the drives (simulating the larger disk). Since any failure kills the whole thing, it's even worse - N*P*C.

I guess maybe your are thinking of RAID5? But is this an enterprise-class hard drive? I'm not buying (or buying electricity for) 3x 1TB drives instead of 1x 2TB drive just to protect my PVR recordings. And since RAID (regardless of level) is not a backup, if the data is any more important than PVR recordings, you still need backups with or without RAID. So all RAID5 gives you is decreased time to recover from a broken drive, by making you buy a spare up front. Obviously decreased downtime is critical for an important server, but not for the vast majority of home PCs.

Re:backups

[corsec67]

Except RAID isn't a backup, so your data isn't that "safe and happy".

Re:backups

[ChienAndalu]

Bittorrent?

Re:backups

[binarylarry]

hmm, nope.

No one was confused. Nor would they care if they were.

Re:backups

[ColdWetDog]

Actually a multi terrabyte RAID 5 drive is a nice bit of the backup solution. No, it's not the be all and end all of backups. You still need separate completely off line and off site backups. But since modern RAID boxes can tell if a drive is bad, you get to look at the blinken light, go "oops", pull the drive and plug another one in. Wander off to Slashdot for a few hours and poof. Your data is back. No muss, no fuss. I like that part.

You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many backups. At least I get the chance to do one out of three....

Re:backups

[dougmc]

No, he didn't imply raid 5. (You did seem to infer that, however.)

Raid 1 would only require two drives. But having three lets you do raid 1, and then periodically remove one of the drives and store it safely offsite and then replace it with the other drive and let the raid rebuild itself. That *is* a proper backup -- though personally I'd just periodically update one backup drive with rsync or something similar with the other backup drive being kept offsite.

Re:backups

[danking]

You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many backups. At least I get the chance to do one out of three....

Say that again when your critical organs start failing from a lack fatty tissue in your body.

Re:backups

[Anarke_Incarnate]

RAID 5+1 is not a backup solution either. You have created a fault tolerant scenario. Backups are there for after the rebuild when you find out that there are additional issues. The issue is not just the part where a drive can be unusable. People have already given scenarios about what can happen to the data. Any "Backup" solution should keep the data in at least 3 places, one of which, should be portable. Tapes, DVDs, removable disks, etc that can be away from the site.

What good is your RAID if you just had a power spike take out the disks along with their motherboard? Small flood in the room took out your tapes and system? Data's all gone now.

Re:backups

[nxtw]

Actually a multi terrabyte RAID 5 drive is a nice bit of the backup solution.

RAID 5 gets increasingly dangerous as drive size increases. Going strictly by published unrecoverable read error rates (1 per 10^14 bits read on recent Seagate desktop drives), the chance of data loss during a rebuild can be very high - 48%, assuming a five-drive array of 1.5 TB drives with this failure rate.
Of course, these figures don't mean that 10^-14 of all bits read will result in a failure. It also doesn't mean that an error will manifest as a flipped bit - instead, one or more sectors will be unreadable (512 bytes each).

The risks of large capacity RAID5 arrays can be mitigated by using more reliable drives or a system that can handle more failures. WD's desktop drives have a failure rate of 1 in 10^15; enterprise drives from all manufacturers usually have a failure rate of 1 in 10^16. And RAID6 can sustain two failures of any drive. Using six 1.5 TB drives with a 10^-15 bit error rate and RAID6 has a failure rate during rebuild under 1%.

Re:backups

[bendodge]

There's another problem. Take a look at this excellent article:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162

SATA drives are commonly specified with an unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of 10^14. Which means that once every 100,000,000,000,000 bits, the disk will very politely tell you that, so sorry, but I really, truly can't read that sector back to you.

...

Disk drive capacities double every 18-24 months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we'll have 2 TB drives.

With a 7 drive RAID 5 disk failure, you'll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an URE. So the read fails. And when that happens, you are one unhappy camper. The message "we can't read this RAID volume" travels up the chain of command until an error message is presented on the screen. 12 TB of your carefully protected - you thought! - data is gone. Oh, you didn't back it up to tape? Bummer!

Re:backups

[Reality Master 301]

Who, me?

Re:backups

[Mordstrom]

Dear god why can I not have mod points when I know what the hell is being discussed! The article quoted in the previous post is SO right and is compounded by the proclivity of manufacturers to hook directly into the firmware on the drive's controller to get even faster performance times. You will _almost_ never be able to recover a failed SATA drive in a RAID 5 configuration where the manufacturers have played with the SATA drive's firmware for performance because of this very issue. SATA drives != fault tolerant enterprise solution! I have personal experience with this phenomena having been sold down the river by a nameless company which no longer does business in the US; I suspect because of this very issue.

Re:backups

[Trixter]

Simple: Buy two, and use one in an eSATA hard drive cradle/dock. Once a night, turn on the dock, back up the data, then turn it off.

Perfect

[timeOday]

Spindle-drives are inherently slow anyways, so I think the combination of a big, power-efficient drive (never mind the speed) for movies and an SSD drive for everything else is ideal.

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

The cache on this drive is 8x larger than the capacity of my first hard drive.

Really Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Two Terabytes should be enough for anybody

WD20?

[argent]

It'll be so slick when the 4.0 TB WD40 comes out.

Re:WD20?

[CopaceticOpus]

Yeah, it's SO easy to confuse a water displacing lubricant with a hard drive. It happens to me all the time!

Followed by a rather embarrassing trip to the emergency room, I imagine.

backups-Blowups.

[Ostracus]

Unless they're all the same model made in Thailand.

But how reliable is it?

[jollyreaper]

Agent smith: What good is 2 terabytes of porn if you are unable to access it?
Keanu: (glances worriedly at his zipper)
agent smith: (palm to face, shakes head) The hard drive, you imbecile, the hard drive.

Green Caviar?

[auric_dude]

No thanks, looks and smells a bit fishy to me.

Re:Green Caviar?

[philspear]

I know, it will TOTALLY clash with the rest of my yellow PC.

Fools say it's DANGEROUS!

[TheMiddleRoad]

Every time a new, larger drive comes out, people say, "That much data in one drive is dangerous!"

So here's what you do. Go buy ten 200GB drives. RAID them together. Who do you think will lose data, you, with ten times the possible failure points, or me with only one?

Just back it up, biznatch!

Re:Fools say it's DANGEROUS!

[Ephemeriis]

Every time a new, larger drive comes out, people say, "That much data in one drive is dangerous!"

So here's what you do. Go buy ten 200GB drives. RAID them together. Who do you think will lose data, you, with ten times the possible failure points, or me with only one?

Just back it up, biznatch!

Well, of course backups are the solution. And anyone with half a clue and some important data has nobody to blame but themselves if they don't have a backup.

But if you've got 10x 200 GB HDDs, and one of them fails, you've only lost 200 GB. And in a RAID setup you might not even notice that single drive failure...which means you can easily slot in a new drive and never lose any data.

While if you're running 1x 2 TB HDD, and that one drive fails, you're pretty much hosed. In this situation you'll be rebuilding your working set from a backup, which might very well take a while. It's certainly more disruptive than slotting in a new drive while your RAID keeps everything up and running with no downtime at all.

The part that concerns me is that live storage seems to be outpacing backup capacity. Sure, LTO4 can hold about 1.5 TB with decent compression... But that isn't even the full capacity of a single one of these drives. RAID a few of them together and you've completely exceeded that tape's capacity. It's getting to the point where the only solution is going to be dumping data to more HDDs, or selling robotic tape libraries to everyone.

Re:That was quick, but normal

[ChienAndalu]

Apperently they are the same. I was a little bit surprised, too.

More room... or backup?

[TheMiddleRoad]

The problem with a larger drive is I fill it quickly. Should I buy a 2TB drive and use it to backup my already full two 1TB drives, or should I just add storage? Oh, the agony!

I'll lose less data

[Reality Master 201]

My RAID setup would use drives from different manufacturers and production lots, and contain hot spares.

Re:That was quick, but normal

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard drive capacity is no longer exponential. They have hit some limits that are pretty hard to overcome. They're still making progress but not nearly as fast as in years past. Additionally, drives larger than 640 GB or so seem to have some reliability problems. I just recently upgraded my RAID arrays and went with smaller 640 GB drives because they have proven more reliable even though it would have been cheaper for me to go with newer larger drives.

The OP was wrong about it being one year anyway.

I hate hard-drives. I wish SSD technology would improve. It's not just price, the current drives are unreliable as hell. I trust regular old mechanical spinning devices a lot more than the current SSD crap.

Good foil for Seagate

[jedidiah]

It will be nice to have someone besides Seagate in this space.
Perhaps they will be motivated to get their act together. If they
don't those of us that buy these kinds of drives at least have an
alternate vendor now.

Re:Good foil for Seagate

[muckdog]

Seagate does not own Western Digital. You are likely thinking of Maxtor.

7 hours?

[mikeee]

It's worse than you think. Even if you have a place to back it up, the I/O rates on modern HDs aren't increasing nearly as fast as capacity. Reading at top speed, it would take almost 7 hours to pull all the data off this drive, even if you have someplace to put it. Similarly, if you're using it as part of a RAID set, it'll take that long to rebuild if you have a failure.

Pretty soon the MTBF on these drives will be a significant fraction of (capacity)/(read rate); that will make for fun all around.

32MB On Disk Cache

[3p1ph4ny]

I was thinking about this the other day, but, does the 32MB on disk cache really matter?

Think of it this way: the Linux kernel does disk caching with my free RAM (which I generally have more than 32MB of) according to some reasonable locality scheme (LRU or something).

If the HDD does the same caching according to nearly the same principles, won't the data on the disk cache nearly always be a subset of the disk cached in RAM? Meaning: doesn't the disk cache have no effect whatsoever?

I'm genuinely interested in an answer to this question, even if it is a little OT. Please burn a little karma for me :)

Re:32MB On Disk Cache

[drsmithy]

If the HDD does the same caching according to nearly the same principles, won't the data on the disk cache nearly always be a subset of the disk cached in RAM? Meaning: doesn't the disk cache have no effect whatsoever?

No, because the OS does not know about the physical layout of sectors on the disk and the HDD controller does. Therefore, it can reorder requests appropriately to maximise performance.

Disabling the cache on a hard disk gives a massive performance hit, especially for writes. They become nearly an order of magnitude slower.

Performance looks surprisingly good!

[arugulatarsus]

This hdd seems to be competing with the spinpoint f1 and the latest of seagate's 7200 RPM hdds. The kicker is this is a "green" series drive. It uses variable RPM technology. It actually spins at 5400 RPM quite often.
I'm still not convinced going green on the HDD will save energy as it drops 10 watts on your total load. In an array of arrays, there may be savings though. Gamers, remember, your power supply/CPU/video card are the biggest culprits. Lower power will generally equate to lower hear and thus less breakdowns though.
I'll wait a few months to see if there are recalls. If there are none, this drive looks like a winner.

rdiff-backup

[quarterbooty]

You should look into rdiff-backup instead of rsync for your nightly backup to the offsite location. rdiff-backup keeps a set of compressed reverse-diffs in each directory that is backed up so that you can restore a file that's lost.

Re:What's the effing power consumption?

[rthille]

Well, you could click twice more, once on this (in the linked PR) http://wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=576 and then on the "Specifications" tab (I hate web 2.0 shit like this where you can't properly link to content).

Power Dissipation
        Read/Write 7.4 Watts
        Idle 4.0 Watts
        Standby 0.97 Watts
        Sleep 0.97 Watts

For comparison, here are the number for the 1TB (32MB cache)
Current Requirements
        Power Dissipation
        Read/Write 5.4 Watts
        Idle 2.8 Watts
        Standby 0.40 Watts
        Sleep 0.40 Watts

I don't understand why Standby/Sleep power use more than doubled... As for the Active, I assume that's due to spinning 2x the platters and added processing power to be able to process the data coming off those platters 2x the speed.

Western Digital past experience

[Tatsh]

I do not think I will be buying this one, or another WD. It is really hard to witness so many dead hard drives (including many DOA) and have your own experiences with their hard drives that just die so quickly. And another thing, why is every WD so damn big? They squeeze into every slot you put them into, not just slide in nicely like any Seagate (or most other brands). This goes for desktop and laptop. No wonder they are making their own external drives. Generic ones may not even fit their drives.

I have had much success with Seagate (lasts 5 years or more) and Hitachi (louder than most HDDs but they last). I do not know the warranty of WD, but the warranty for both Seagate and Hitachi are great (especially the Seagate one).

I am sure some people have luck, but after 2 dead hard drives (and many DOAs at a shop I worked at) and physical size problems, I will probably never give WD another chance, no matter what the price.

Re:Street date?

[Joce640k]

FTA: Price is $299, street date is "as fast as the trucks can get them there". THe first ones will probably be online.

PS: 2Tb for $299...!

I remember paying that much for 200Mb and thinking it was an incredible bargain compared to the old 20Mb drives (which cost thousands).

Re:Street date?

[phozz bare]

Already on sale in Australia, at about US$250.

WD Layoffs

[frog_strat]

They had a round of layoffs in December. Another one coming in the spring. They are getting a little short handed. I hope the quality stays up.

Re:2,000,000,000,000

[forkazoo]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/UnderstandingHDFormats.aspx#storageneedsforhdcapture

Short answer: hell no.

And, if you get into any visual effects for your hours of uncompressed video, you may eventually discover the joys of the multilayer exr format. It's currently becoming very popular for rendering multipass CG in the effects world, and basically it allows you to render one file which contains separate images for matte passes, diffuse shading, base color, specular lighting, reflection, etc., etc. The new workflows available make this technique suddenly much more popular. And, a lot of studios will render out 32 bit per channel instead of the 10 bit per channel listed in the table you linked. So, multiply the data rates at the top end of that chart by a factor of at least fifteen when talking about CG. Then double it because it'll be done progressive instead of interlaced. Then double it again because you wouldn't render to 4:2:0 - you'd render to 4:4:4. Then quadruple it because you want to work at 4k instead of 2k HD. Then, if you want to work at the high end in 8k, quadruple it again. (Though, not many people are currently working in 8k, and those who are do so at 24p, not 60p. So, the final quadrupling is probably unfair.)

Now, think about how many iterations you go through as the director says "Make this part faster. Make the wing flaps longer. Make Jar Jar die." Whatever. You wind up with umpteen version of a sequence that you want to keep around for review and comparison.

So, yeah. There are plenty of fields where 2 TB is a tiny joke, rather than being enough for a lifetime of data. I just happen to be involved with one of them. :) Some studios passed the 100 TB online mark years ago. Hollywood will take all the storage the engineers can give them. And big GPU's. :)

Here in the real world

[coryking]

We dont want to spend a bazillion dollars to buy a tape drive for home use. "Offsite" is not an answer either because our internet isn't fast enough, and there exists no cheap media to backup 2TB of data. DVD only holds like 4 gigs so you'd need about 500 or so of those. Blu-ray might make that 50 disks or so.

The proper answer for the backup of any media at home is "buy another hard drive and copy to that". Any other suggestion, such as a $3,000 tape drive that still only holds 800GB (!!!) is academic, pedantic, impractical or all three.

Short answer: basically, there is no good answer. Buying a second drive is the best we have these days.