RSSHere come the Caviar 1 TB drives
By Michael Hatamoto | Published June 10, 2008, 6:38 PM
As more manufacturers aim for the 1 TB storage high-water mark, Western Digital pushed the pace further today with the announcement of its new 7200 rpm 3.5-inch SATA Caviar hard drives, in 750 GB and 1 TB capacities.
The new line of 3.5-inch Caviars, which will ship next week, features 7200 rpm spin speed, 32 MB cache, SATA 3 GB/s interface.
Although WD is promoting these new Caviars as the fastest available in their form factor, the company did not offer any independent benchmarks, and the major enthusiast sites have yet to get their hands on one. However, the dual processor and 32 MB of cache is expected to be a step above similar HDDs that feature just one processor and only 16 MB of cache.
The new models will feature the company's StableTrac technology, introduced last year. Rather than attach motor mounts to the bottom only, WD's motor shafts are now secured at both ends, helping to increase read and write operation tracking. Internal lab testing also led WD to create a new "NoTouch ramp load technology" where the recording head in the HDD does not touch the disk media, and that helps limit the wear to the recording head.
One terabyte is the new standard these days, with Seagate, Hitachi, and Samsung also promoting 1 TB 7200 rpm HDDs to their product lines in recent months. The new WD Caviar HDDs will be available next week, with a $200 price tag for the 750 GB HDD, and $250 price tag for the 1 TB model.
Yes but 1 megabyte is all you will ever need! One of my earlier computers, a 386, had two 156 megabyte drives and a tape backup, it cost 8300 new back in 1992! But my very first had 16 K onboard and a cassette tape for storage - a TI99/4A... it took everything it could dish out to create one full screen image, a centerfold that me and my buddy stayed up all night long inserting pixel by pixel until the picture was finally done! And now a Tarabyte... Kewl!
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|yeah I remember paying 230€ for an 430Mb HD in 1994. I had 2 partitions on it because it was so ! :). One had windows 3.1 (running office, photoshop and corel 4.0) and DOS, and the other had 4dos and terminat and was trimmed so I could call into BBS systems with my 2400baud modem. It all ran smooth when I booted from my speciall QUEMM disk.
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|Haven't they already put out 1 Terabyte drives, like this one here:
The Western Digital 1TB My Book Essential Edition with USB 2.0
Model: WDH1U10000N
I thought those drives already had 16 meg of cache (instead of 32) and a 7200 rpm speed?
Isn't that correct?
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|They wernt SATA.
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|So the primary difference between between this drive that the 1TB external shown below is the 32 meg of case (vs 16) and the SATA interfae?
Otherwise the external drives are pretty up-to-date in terms of capabilities ard caacity"
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|yeah but you're comparing apples to oranges ... I've never seen an external drive function nearly as quickly as an internal.
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|I've been following the reviews of 1TB drives on NewEgg and my advice is to not buy one right away. See how the reviews pan out first. The reviews will give a good indication of the yield rates.
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|Not a single WD ever lost more than one star. And number of reviews is usually in the hundreds.
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|How much storage space after formating?
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|About 953GiB
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|They really should set the proper term for size on drives. Its like with the old CRT monitors when they claimed something in inches but the visible size was really an inch smaller. Its misleading.
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|The reason for the difference in value from the advertised capacity to the actual end user capacity is because of two reasons.
Firstly, hard disk manufacturers define 1 kb as 1,000 bytes and 1 Mb as 1,000,000 bytes. However, your operating system defines 1 kb as 1,024 bytes and 1 Mb as 1,048,576 bytes. I use to hate the fact that hard disk manufactures state a kb as a smaller value as it made their hard disks seem larger than they actually were. However I later found out that hard disk manufactures are actually right (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte). Technically, operating systems are confusing kb with kib (which actually does mean 1024 bytes, kb means 1000 bytes). (Notice that melkor did use the correct Gib notation).
Secondly, you need to format a hard disk before you can use it, and people often assume that the formatting table (whether it is FAT32, NTFS or Linux's ext2) does not take up any space. However it does take up a significant space, as it needs to address all the locations possible on a hard disk. Hard disk manufacturers can't state that the hard disk can store 931 Gib as they do not know which formatting you will use (e.g. NTFS uses more space that FAT32).
Hard disk manufactures are using the correct terminology, it is operating systems and users who need to understand the difference between Gb and Gib.
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|If some lawyer hadn't been trying to cover a drive makers butt, there would be no need to understand the difference between GiB and GB - there simply should not be GiB - it appears nowhere else in the world.
The idiots of the world should simply be told that in computers, everything is based on binary, so KB is 1024, and GB is... well, you know.
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|The other portion that doesn't make sense with that whole explanation is that they very easily could rate their HD in the details (For an NTFS partition this drive will exhibit X GB) But they don't. They don't b/c they make themselves look better.
It's starting to get to the point of ridiculousness. I mean if you think about it the larger we get in HD space, the more and more space is lost to this void. I'm sure the drive tables will eventually be null and void b/c new tech will come out and new file systems will develop, but it just doesn't make sense to have the 1tb vernacular.
Look at this point in time with a 1tb drive ... you lose the better part of 100 gb! That's insanity!
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|931.30 GB
http://wdc.custhelp.com/...mp;p_created=1034613413
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