We will post a review for Barracuda XT as soon as it becomes available. All the other drives are based on the SATA-300 interface. Seagate announced last week the launch of their first 7,200 rpm 2 TB hard drive, Barracuda XT, which is based on the new SATA-600 interface, doubling the available bandwidth. We couldn’t find Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB being sold yet. Prices were reasearched at on the day we published this review. Western Digital does not inform at what speed their Caviar Green drives spin 5,400 rpm is our educated guess. Here is a summary of the hard drives we are going to compare: Manufacturer Read our Hard Disk Drives Capacity Limits tutorial for further information on this subject. As you may be aware, the capacity advertised by hard disk drive manufacturers isn’t the real drive capacity. Western Digital covers the WD20EARS with a three-year warranty about average for devices in this class, but not the extensive five-year coverage that WD offers on their Caviar Black and Raptor performance drives. With some enterprise-class drives, for example, the manufacturer can ship a new drive in case of failure before the client sends the defective drive to them, reducing the down time of a server.Ģ TB hard disk drives have a real capacity of 1.82 TB or 1,863 GB (3,907,029,168 sectors). Since this kind of port limits the drive performance, the hard disk drive doesn’t need to be the fastest around and thus you can save money both on the cost of the drive and on your electricity bill.ĭrives targeted to the enterprise segment (i.e., servers), on the other hand, have a higher reliability, as required for this market segment, with some manufacturers providing extended warranty contracts with the drive. Drives from this category are mainly targeted to external enclosures that are going to be connected to the computer through a USB or FireWire port. The trade-off is obviously performance: since they rotate at lower speeds “green” drives present lower performance.
Hard drives typically consume between 8-10 W “green” models consume practically half of this. Let’s take a look at the performance from these new drives. Western Digital has finally released two 7,200 rpm models, Caviar Black (targeted to desktops) and RE4 (targeted to servers). (1.5 TB and 2 TB only) View demo NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.Until very recently the only 2 TB hard disk drives available on the market were “green” models, rotating at lower speeds in order to save energy, like Seagate Barracuda LP and Western Digital Caviar Green. (1.5 TB and 2 TB only) StableTrac - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations. This item Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Internal Desktop Hard Drive - WD2002FAEX Western Digital 6TB WD Black Performance Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy. The primary actuator providesĬoarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. WD Caviar Black hard drives are offered with a SATA 6 Gb/s or a SATA 3 Gb/s interface.ĭual actuator technology - A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s).
Colossal cache - Bigger, faster cache of up to 64 MB means faster performance. Dual processor - Twice the processing power to maximize performance.