Western Digital seems to be the first HDD maker to offer a two-terabyte hard disk drive, pushing aside Seagate's 1.5TB solution.
The new disc is part of Western Digital's "Green" of energy-efficient hard disc drive. WD Caviar Green drives are designed for use in USB/FireWire/eSATA external hard drives, desktop computers, workstations, and desktop RAID environments.
The 3.5-inch WD20EADS sports a 7,200RPM spin speed, 32MB of cache and comes with a SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface. It is available now for $299.00 USD.
The new HDD is using four 500GB platters (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) and of course, employs the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) - Employs PMR technology.
A number of advanced technologies enable the speed, capacity and performance of WD's Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive. Those include: StableTrac, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations1; IntelliPower, which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance; IntelliSeek, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration; and NoTouch ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection while in transit.
Judging from this high aerial density, the new WD20EADS HDD should be faster than the company's 10,000-RPM Velociraptor drives or Seagate's 1.5TB products - which is also expected to respond with a 2TB offering in the following months.