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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."
It's really only 1800 Gigs.
Ah, the drivemaker's kilobyte...
The cache on this drive is 8x larger than the capacity of my first hard drive.
What the hell do you do to back up your 2TB drive?
2 other 2TB drives?
It'll be so slick when the 4.0 TB WD40 comes out.
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?
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.
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.
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!
The government can't save you.
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?