Western Digital Launches Internal 2.5TB and 3TB Hard Drives

Last month, I took a look at a unique external hard drive solution, Seagate’s 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex Desk. The reason it’s unique is obvious… its 3TB stature. Up until the release of that product, all we saw were 2TB solutions, and the reason was due to a couple of technological hurdles that storage vendors are just now beginning to tackle – no doubt thanks to the fact that hard drives today can be physically produced with even denser platters.

The hurdles to overcome are not that convenient, and if you’re interested in diving a bit deeper into the specifics, I highly recommend reading through this page from the aforementioned review. In gist, a 2.1TB+ drive needs to utilize the GPT (GUID Partition Type) partition scheme, and likewise, you need to use an OS that supports it, such as Windows 7, Mac OS X or recent Linux distros. Even then, unless the PC has an EFI-type BIOS, any partition over 2.1TB will not be bootable.

What happens if you don’t have a GPT partition is something like this, where you will see the drive’s space split into two different partitions, the first of which will top out at around 2TB. Once you enable GPT, the drive will realistically become one clean 3TB partition as you’d want it to.

To help things work smoothly with its drive, Seagate launched its first 3TB model as an external product, and thanks to the dock doing some of the work, users didn’t have to worry about much. Seagate is bound to release an internal 3TB product nonetheless in the near-future, but Western Digital beat it to the punch by today announcing its latest Caviar Green models, at 2.5TB and 3TB.

To help people get around the mentioned issues, the company is bundling each one of its drives with a PCI Express SATA (AHCI) host adapter, which will automatically filter through the information from the drive to the OS to make sure a proper driver is in use. Once installed, the OS will see the drive as using 4K sectors, but in reality, the drive will be juggling 512-byte sectors. This is the same trickery seen in Seagate’s offering.

Also as mentioned, this drive cannot be bootable, unless you happen to have a PC that supports EFI, and chances are good you don’t. Those who are using Apple PCs don’t have anything to worry about, as EFI has been supported there for the past couple of years. To be honest though, I don’t think many people care to have a 3TB drive as a boot disk, because the major purpose of a drive so large, and also one that’s “Green” is to use it for storage, and overall, there doesn’t seem to be huge demand for faster storage drives. Even so, it’d be great to see a Caviar Black version of WD’s 3TB sooner than later.

The 2.5TB Caviar Green will retail for $189 USD, while the 3TB version will retail for $239 USD.

LAKE FOREST, Calif., Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ — WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced that the company is shipping the world’s largest capacity SATA hard drive. As the latest addition to its WD Caviar Green family of SATA hard drives (photo), the new hard drives deliver up to a massive 3 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity on a single drive. WD is leading the industry in capacity for SATA hard drives by utilizing 750 GB-per-platter areal density and Advanced Format (AF) technology.