Western Digital Launches World’s First 2TB Hard Drives

Western Digital today announced what we new was inevitable, a 2TB hard drive, built using four 500 GB platters, which produce an areal density of 400 GB/in2. The launch model is part of WD’s Caviar Green series, meaning that it’s designed for low noise, low power consumption and for the most part, is better than the rest for being used in smaller PCs, such as HTPCs, WD claims.

The new drive’s SRP is $299, or ~$0.15 per GB, which is a rather healthy boost over the 1 TB’s average cost of ~$0.11 per GB. It’s clear that this drive is designed for those who want to maximize as much of their chassis hard drive bay space as possible, while having an insane amount of storage space to deal with. I admit, I’m not even sure I could completely fill something like this anytime soon. I have 2.25 TB worth of storage in my main computer, and I only have about 60% of it used, plus, a lot of that is backup.

Our friends at Hot Hardware have had an ES drive in their lab for the past week and have been able to put it to a quick test to see how it delivers on the performance front. Once formatted, the drive will offer 1.81 TB for use, and at first glance, you can expect a read speed of around 90.0 MB/s, and Write of 80.3 MB/s. Not too shabby for a low-powered super-large drive! You can expect these to begin popping up on your favorite e-tailers this week.

“While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries,” said Mark Geenen, President of Trend Focus. “The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user’s insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives.”