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2.5TB and 3TB WD Computer Hard drives

The first rumors about 2TB drives appeared on the Internet in January 2009. These 2TB drives from WD were launched shortly after that and quickly became the biggest hard drives in the desktop sector, recognized for both reliability and efficiency, while 1.5TB Seagate hard drives had frequent problems at the time.

Since the introduction of 2TB hard drives almost 2 years have passed and the industry seems to be slowing down in the improvement of hard drive capacity. In the year 2010 3TB desktop drives are not yet available, and 1.5TB 2.5” laptop drives share the same fate, because the released models with such high capacities are not yet small enough (physically) to fit standard desktop/laptop drive bays, just in special external hard disk racks.

Western Digital is about to change all that, On-line stores in Australia already added two high capacity hard drives that don’t exceed the physical size of any standard 3.5” desktop hard drive. WD25EZRSDTL has 2,500,495 MB of usable space while the other model, WD30EZRSDTL has a formatted capacity of 3,000,592 MB. Well, these figures bring us back to the old marketing scheme that uses a 1000 multiplier instead of 1024, so in reality you get 2.384TB and 2.861TB, but at this point most users don’t get hung up on such technicalities, because the difference in capacity is still there as long as all hard drives are measured in thousands and millions of megabytes instead of what these units of measure should mean.

In terms of performance unfortunately these green hard drives are disappointing, because they are built to be efficient, and not fast, so the average transfer rate (to/from) is of about 110MB/s. This is because of the annoying IntelliPower design, a technology that regulates the rotation speed of the hard drive from 5400RPM up to 7200RPM, only WD knows for sure how it works. In my opinion it’s a wrong move to save 2 lousy watts by chopping down performance, since the hard drive is no longer a major power consumer (it needs only around 6Watts) in an average computer system compared to 140Watt processors (Core i7 LGA1366) and 400Watt graphics cards (overclocked Radeon 5970).

Connecting the hard drive to any computer system may be a little tricky. First of all no 32bit operating system will accept hard drives bigger than 2.19TB as boot drives, not even the 64bit version of Windows XP. Anticipating this problem, WD included a PCI-Express 1x S-ATA controller card that will allow any desktop with a free PCI-Express slot to use a >2.19TB drive at least as a secondary storage drive. Officially however WD has published a table with supported operating systems, but it doesn’t make things any clearer. To be sure that your computer and operating system will support large (>2.19TB) hard drives you’ll have to contact customer support. Personally I’m disappointed in WD, because it should have implemented some kind of compatibility mode for older desktops and operating systems just like the 2GB or 32GB jumper on older drives.

In the US potential customers may have to wait a bit more, but recommended retail prices are already known: $189 and $239 (3 years warranty included).