Western Digital Gives Some Competition

With Seagate having such problems with its 7200.11 Barracuda drives, what an excellent time for Western Digital to come forth with announcements of new, large hard drives, all with no recent records of bad manufacturing to taint the story. As an aside, not many know that it is not simply the 1 and 1.5 TB drives that are having the problems; it is simply those drives getting all the news time. The entire family of 7200.11 Barracudas are having troubles, due to the electronics, not the mechanicals.

The story of how green the drives are is also a good story, with everyone concerned about the power consumed by devices, whether its for the cost, the environmental impact, or both. The only thing I await is the long term testing of these variable spindle speed drives, as I expect their lifespans to be less than drives with a fixed speed motor speed.  Much of the wear and tear is going to be in the increasing of spindle speed for prolonged seeks and writes.

Western Digital drives are usually tested as faster than Seagate drives in the popular testing methodology used by consumer magazines. In my own personal testing, I find that subjectively, Western Digital drives simply feel ‘zippier’ which I ascribe to the better caching algorithms that company uses. I have WDs and Seagates of equal sizes, and the WDs, with half the cache on board, still seem faster in random reads and writes. It is only when doing sustained reads, or writes, over a period, such as moving 500MB or more at once, that the Seagate comes out ahead.

Rumors first appeared about two weeks ago that Western Digital planned on releasing 1.5TB and 2TB hard drives. As of today, the rumors are official. WD is introducing its third-generation GreenPower drive series and WD manages to reach the two terabyte milestone first. The latest Caviar Green (WD20EADS) hits the 2TB mark with four 500GB platters, each rated with an areal density of 400Gb/in².

Of course, the first question that comes to mind is spindle speeds. Western Digital does not comment on exact rotational speeds with the GreenPower drives, only to say that it is close to 5,400RPM. While that is important for some, we see it a bit differently as this latest Green’s high areal density, combined with 32MB of cache, and new electronics will provide very good performance.

This particular series of Green Drives features an update to WD’s Intelligent Drive Technology. 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; 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.

Western Digital says the 2TB Caviar Greens will ship late this week, so expect to see them at e-tailers soon. WD’s suggested list price for the drive is $299, which is certainly more than two of their top performing Caviar Black 1TB drives . However, you end up with a single drive featuring improved acoustics and power consumption along with performance that should satisfy most users. The 1.5TB drive should ship later this quarter. We decided to take a break from the firmware carousel and will provide an in-depth review of the Caviar Green 2TB drive once our retail unit arrives.

from AnandTech

Thinking about my first hard drive purchase, which was a 200 MB IDE drive, and the cost, $525, it makes one sense that progress over the past 17 years is beyond astounding.

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