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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."
Wasn't it only about a year ago that 1TB drives hit the market?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I was worried I would have to start deleting from my *cough* adult movie collection *cough* to make more room
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
What the hell do you do to back up your 2TB drive?
That much storage in a single unit seems kind of dangerous.
It's really only 1800 Gigs.
Ah, the drivemaker's kilobyte...
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.
The cache on this drive is 8x larger than the capacity of my first hard drive.
It'll be so slick when the 4.0 TB WD40 comes out.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
No thanks, looks and smells a bit fishy to me.
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!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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!
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.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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! :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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.
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.
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).
You mean 1800 Gibibytes?
I will never, ever, in my entire life, even once mean "gibibytes".
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?