WD launches industry’s first 2 TB hard drive

January WD today announced the first 2 terabyte hard drive – the world’s highest capacity drive and the latest addition to the WD Caviar Green hard drive family. The drive is likely to become hot property due to ever increasing need for hard disk space – already in the United States, some ten percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are 1 TB or more.

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

WD Caviar Green drives are designed for use in USB/FireWire/eSATA external hard drives, desktop computers, workstations, and desktop RAID environments.

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 stabilise 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.