Hm. This actually reminds me how awesome the Caviar SE16 640GB is...

I'd like to make the comment that while this drive seems like a total performance winner, do yourself a favor and question the need to have performance in a drive, that probably for most of you, will only be used for storage.

I recently picked up a WD10EAVS; its the 8mb cache version of the 1TBs. Obviously it isn't the fastest drive on the market but hey, it only cost me $120 bux (cad) after tax.

Wow!! Only costs 300 bucks to lose 2TB of data... Awesome...

nice review and the perfect partner to a blazing fast SSD. Given how little power this and most SSDs consume, that would give a fast and capacious storage system that consumes very little power. Make a big dent in the wallet though.

I still don't get WDs obfuscation about spindle speeds though - even the intro to this review contradicts itself. I haven't seen any trustworthy evidence that shows Green drives faster than 5400rpm (even harmonic freq spectrographic evidence) and WD itself (in the intro) says that all Green drives are +/- 5% spindle speed. Ergo, they are all 5400rpm drives. I can't really see why they would vary spindle speed by such small amounts around the 5400rpm norm as it would make little difference (esp. compared to dropping form 7200>5400rpm) and would be a bugger to engineer. Almost sounds like a manufacturing margin of error.

Surely this can be put to rest once and for all? Or is there pressure coming from WD to keep peddling their smoke and mirrors?

When these get down to about $150 or less, I'll get a couple. Right now I'm playing it stupid with about 3TB of stuff not backed up properly.

I already had a WD 500GB fail on me a couple months ago which is making me a little itchy. I've learned never to trust a mechanical drive no matter who made it. Maxtor, Seagate, WD... they've all failed on me over the years.

Can't see how this beats out 1.5 TB barracudas. Seagate has hammered out the all kinks and they are seriously cheap. For the price of one of these 2TB drives, you can have 2x 1.5 TB barracudas. And by my count, on the tests that really count, the 1.5 TB barracuda trashed the 2TB green drive...

And yeah SE16 640Gb drives are really something. Wish they'd go down ten bucks in price though :(

I can't imagine having 200GB let alone 2TB of applications, so speed here doesn't interest me much. They're all more than fast enough to stream HD video.

33% higher capacity and 35% lower heat than the Seagate 7200.11 / 1.5 interests me a lot.

Waiting for the price to drop a little, then I'm in for three or four.

We need 1.5TB's to come with 500gb platters and be 89$ US within 3 months, then I'll ditch my 750's! :)

Not gonna happen, I know.

By "tests that really count" I mean the real world load times, (system boot, level loads, etc), multitasking tests and HD tach average read and average write tests. In general performance between the two drives where somewhat close, or heavily heavily skewed in seagate's favor. The max read test is a good example, or the doom level loads... I mean a both a 20mb/s lead on average read and average write? Are you kidding me?

And considering that for the price of the one 2TB drive, you can get 2x 1.5TB drives that out perform it and still save a considerable chunk (I saw a deal for a 1.5 TB drive for $109 yesterday), I just don't see the niche market for the 2TB drive. Why shell out more, for less?

Besides like I said, the 1.5TB mess worked out well for the consumer as the prices dropped whilst the problems where fixed. Buy the drive, download the firmware if necessary, and laugh your way to the bank. I know I did :)

I don't know how much truth there is in it, but I was told that most of the capacity increase we see these days is from compression techniques and not true areal density recording breakthroughs.

Contrary what the article states, you cannot distinguish the models based on 333GB platters from those based on 250GB platters by the model name. This only works for the WD10EADS (which indeed always has the 333GB platters), however chances are if you nowadays buy a WD10EACS it is also a 3 platter and not 4 platter drive (haven't seen a real review of the new design but performance is likely closer to the WD10EADS rather than the old 4 platter version due to the much increased linear transfer rates, cache size is likely less important).
I wouldn't even be surprised the least if we'd see 2-platter WD10EACS in the future too...

I gotta say that's really impressive performance for the low power consumption.

Congrats Usacomp2k3 for the chart thing! :-)

Interesting. I do find myself carving a spot in my mind where a slower, lower consumption drive would be useful on the desktop.

It's tempting to think about a pair of these in a RAID1 for general data storage. I'm moving more and more to a multi-tiered approach for my drives. I'm finally putting my old 32GB 10k SCSI drive out to pasture and don't feel like putting a noisy 15k drive in, especially since those SATA Velociraptors perform so well without the added boot time and flummoxing F6 install of the Adaptec card. So I've been using a 2-tier approach for a while, and now a 3-tier approach is making more sense.

It's interesting to see how tiering data across the board becomes more and more granular. You have CPU registers, then L1 cache, L2 cache, sometimes L3 cache, then system memory. Not to mention whatever buffers might be utilized in the memory controller on each side. I've been using multiple hard drives for ages, always trying to have a fast drive for my OS. Now I'm looking into a small drive like a Velociraptor or maybe waiting another year one of those Intel SSDs at a better price, then probably a decently fast 7200rpm drive for apps and games, and then maybe one of these Green drives for general storage.

Only issue is that when I really get around to it, I tend to just buy a new, fast large drive and add it to the collection, finally retiring drives either when they die, or become to small to be worth keeping in the case. I recently retired a 120GB drive to the shelf after a slight life extension in a external USB case. Keeping up with this, it is hard for me to justify specific purchase of storage drives when the pile of older drives I keep usually meets my needs. I usually just buy the newest price/GB drive every year or so and add it to the pile.

Very impressive. Good to acceptable performance in almost all tests unlike the Jeckyll and Hyde Seagate 1.5TB, within spitting distance of the 1 TB Caviar Black, loads of space. Too bad about the flagship premium pricing, its street price is more than 2x WD's own 1TB drives, otherwise there's nothing to complain about.

2TB. WOW. PROGRESS BEFORE MY EYEZ.

Cool. Thanks for the numbers Geoff.
I will say though, that even though the 1.5Tb Seagate is cheaper/gb, I'm still a little weary of their reliability.

March, 'eh, for the 1TB? I might wait for that then. I'm looking at doing a 1TB drive in an external enclosure for backups, as I currently don't have anything on that front. 1TB would allow me to comfortably backup my 640GB drive in my desktop as well as my laptop's 160GB drive.

I definately like it!
This is gonna be my next storage upgrade. I've got a WD640 as a sys drive and one of the "new" 1TB drives for storage so far and I'm really happy with that! Call me a WD fanboi but in my opinion they own the oppostion when it comes to mechanical!