Published: Tuesday 1st September, 2009 | Author: Parm Mann
Products: Caviar Black, RE4
Companies: Western Digital (All Western Digital content)
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email to a friendWestern Digital has today officially launched its first 7,200RPM 2TB hard drives in the form of the desktop-orientated Caviar Black and the enterprise-specific RE4.
The Caviar Black, first hinted at back in June and pictured below, is a high performance alternative to the existing Caviar Green.
The drive features four 500GB platters, a 7,200RPM spin speed, 64MB of cache, a dual-state actuator and a dual processor - all combining to provide what Western Digital claims to be the "ultimate performance in a maximum-capacity drive".
For the workstation market, there's also the 2TB RE4. Aimed at those who require "superior reliability", the drive provides features such as Active Power Save, a multi-axis shock sensor, pressure sensors, time-limited error recovery and a 1.2 million hours MTBF.
Sounds expensive, and they are. The 2TB Caviar Black is shipping now with an MSRP of $299 (expect to see it in the UK at around £200), while the 2TB RE4 is in the process of being qualified by OEMs.
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... my head hurts :)Quote
So the drives get bigger and bigger but so does the amount of space needed to back them up so you get even bigger drives to back-up those drives to and...
... my head hurts :)
Nah, easy solution. You just have to buy two of everything :). As long as you don't tell your wallet, it'll be fine.Quote
I agree, but what about a media drive? That's a completely different kettle of fish. Suppose somebody wants to rip bluray films direct to a server - at 25-30GB per film, a 2TB drive will fill up pretty rapidly.
The point I was making isn't about capacity though. I welcome 2TB drives given that I am a heavy user of HD space. The Caviar Black is a premium drive, not in the same league SSD or even the Velociraptor/decent 10-15k RPM drives, but it already comes at a premium compares to other 7.2k RPM drives. 2TB is also a flagship capacity that comes at a premium. Put them together, and I suspect that we will end up with a drive that is more expensive than even existing 2TB drives (which are quite expensive even compared to 1.5TB drives). I just don't think that a media drive would benefit a lot from a Caviar Black over a Caviar Green (for instance) which is quieter, more energy efficient (which means cooler, not a bad thing in an array) and typically cheaper.Quote
The point I was making isn't about capacity though. I welcome 2TB drives given that I am a heavy user of HD space. The Caviar Black is a premium drive, not in the same league SSD or even the Velociraptor/decent 10-15k RPM drives, but it already comes at a premium compares to other 7.2k RPM drives. 2TB is also a flagship capacity that comes at a premium. Put them together, and I suspect that we will end up with a drive that is more expensive than even existing 2TB drives (which are quite expensive even compared to 1.5TB drives). I just don't think that a media drive would benefit a lot from a Caviar Black over a Caviar Green (for instance) which is quieter, more energy efficient (which means cooler, not a bad thing in an array) and typically cheaper.
Yeah, I see what you mean. Given that the green drives = media storage, Enterprise = large and fast data storage for specialist requirements eg servers, I guess it is hard to see where the Black fits in as a fast desktop drive. I think a lot of it is to do with the fact that people are, for whatever reason, far more inclined to purchase a computer with one huge drive (because they need the space for media), and put everything on one huge partition, than to look for a multiple drive solution.
Further on from that, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people didn't even realise that you could have multiple disks inside a system. And whilst these people might not be typical customers for a separate drive to install into their system, I'll be that some of them buy from the likes of Alienware, who could market a 2TB Black very easily, and no doubt very successfully, given the right pricing.
As for the rest of the market, I won't get started on e-penises...Quote
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