Western Digital debuts 2TB, 7200RPM Caviar HDDs

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Jos

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Those looking to squeeze the most performance possible out of their desktop PCs no matter the cost can plop a few hundred dollars on a solid state drive and enjoy the sweet ride -- check out our recent roundup here. However, if having lots of storage space without compromising much on speed or price is more your thing, you might be interested in Western Digital's latest addition to the Caviar line.

Unlike their relatively slow 2TB Caviar Green, the new 2TB Caviar Black and RE series drives have their platters rotating at a full 7,200 RPM. Each drive contains four platters sporting 500GB each along with a new 64MB cache scheme, dual processors, and five-year warranties. Also featured are dual actuators which apparently deserve a lot of the credit for getting such high-density platters up to speed.

The company says its Caviar Black series is intended for gaming, high-performance desktop systems and workstations; while the 2TB RE4 drive is essentially an enterprise-class version hopped up on RAID-specific features and additional validation testing.

The first will be available shortly from local and online retailers at a $299 price point -- the same starting price for the original 2TB Caviar Green that now sells for about $210 -- while the latter is currently being qualified by OEMs and should debut in the next couple of weeks at a still undisclosed price.

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I wouldn't be interested in giving 2TB to a Windows system partition, but thats just me.
 
I tend to use these drives as media drives for video editing and archiving my media files. Does anyone actually use these TB drives for their OS?
 
Oh I use two 640 blacks as my main OS and two 1TB blacks as my storage drives. I have a problem with the 1TB making a seek noise when idle alot more when I used them as my main OS. I think WD wants you to buy there higher prices versions if you useing raid. But my two 640 blacks in raid are quiet and super fast. I recommend them to everyone I know.
 
To answer tangeta, I use a 1.5TB Seagate drive for my windows vista home premium os. I had trouble with the drive becoming unresponsive for 30 seconds after boot and making clicking and whining noise during that time, but a firmware fix corrected that. Seagate explicitly told me NOT to upgrade the firmware and I had to hunt for it thru 1000 results on their site, go figure.
 
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