WD launches industry's first 2 TB hard drives

This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD's industry-leading 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) with 32 MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2 TB.

"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."

External storage solutions are a common place for extreme-capacity drives to help consumers manage these media libraries. WD's My Book family is one of the first applications of the new WD Caviar Green 2 TB drive family.

WD Caviar Green is one of the most successful product lines in the company's recent history with its third-generation GreenPower technology, now providing 2 TB of proven reliable storage for today's high-resolution files and graphics. WD Caviar Green drives are designed for use in USB/FireWire/eSATA external hard drives, desktop computers, workstations, and desktop RAID environments.

"Saving power without sacrificing storage capacity is what consumers want, and what many businesses are requiring today. With the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive, customers receive the additional capacities needed to operate today's highly advanced programs and high-resolution digital files while using less power than typical drives with similar speeds and capacities," said Didier Trassaert, Senior Director Western Digital, EMEA Branded Products.

Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture, Cool, Quiet Hard Drives

A number of advanced technologies enable the speed, capacity and performance of WD's Caviar Green 1.5 TB and 2 TB hard drives. 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 operations ; 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.