WD rolls out 3TB today

Yesterday, we suggested Western Digital could introduce its 3TB drive in a week or two. But it's gone and announced it today. There are three USB 3.0 products: the My Passport Essential portable hard drive, the SE version of that product, and the My Book Essential external hard drive. The My Book Essential has 1, 1.5 and 2TB …

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds good but

if it's anything like their other "green" products, they are not supported in RAID configuration, and are insanely slow to the point that windows will freeze occasionally when used as a system drive. Apparently they are only recommended for archival in single disk scenarios but don't have the bandwidth for MP3 playback or video from what I've seen

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: sounds good but

Interesting... I have 4 GP drives in a RAID5, and it's not that fast but attributed it to a slow built in controller on the MB.

Do you have a link with more details?

[frank ly]

Green can be good

I've got a 1TB 3.5" WD 'Green Power' drive, in a single disk archive scenario situation, plugged into the USB port (via an adaptor) of an old Plextor NAS box (for read-only configuration). It runs very cool (because it powers up and rattles around slowly) and it does power down and go to sleep if you ignore it for a few minutes; taking a good 15 seconds to come back up again. However, once you get it awake and interested, it will deliver two video streams simultaneously, with no droppage.

This is a drive which is specified for AV streaming applications, which is why I chose it for my home media archive; other types in the product lineup may differ.

[Ammaross Danan]

First....

First, who would use a 5400rpm (or even a variable rpm) "Green" drive as their primary system disk? Secondly, does your system even support a 3TB primary drive? Many do not. Lastly, the "green" drives DO have quite decent performance for most takes, easily handling "mp3 playback" and the like. It's definately shooting for an archival drive though, since a 3TB drive is beyond most BIOSes ability to address atm.

[JC 2]

@ First....

Who would potentially use a 5400 RPM drive is anyone who knows a lot about computers.

The typical user runs a given set of apps and today with gigs of memory dirt cheap, the system filecache handles all that, then instead of shutting down (windoze) you hibernate.

There is only a very tiny difference in use of a 5400RPM drive and 7200RPM, millisecond differences at a time that a human can not perceive spread out through a day. Benchmarks don't paint a true picture because they TRY to find differences by executing things over and over faster than 100 humans ever could, and the reviewers are clueless thinking a system "needs" to be fresh booted so they are completely ignoring the fact that the file cache is there for a very good reason, that it's quite a bit faster than even the best SSD.

[noodle heimer]

work fine for me

granted, that's in a synology box, so it's software raid in linux, but the OS is installed on the first partition, which is an mdraid.

I've run the green power part both in raid5, raid6 and raid10 configurations.

I have not tried putting an OS on them and booting a gui from them. Entirely possilbe that'd blow.

[Anonymous Coward]

120-minute (two hour)

Yep, thanks for that.

and in eru's? (el reg units)

[Steven Knox]

As well as

"We don't know the actual areal density [of a 750GB/platter drive], but it would seem to be 50 per cent greater than that of a 500GB/platter drive."

That'd be so -- unless they're using some new Thin As-in Reduced-Dimension Interior Sidewall technology to fit much larger platters into the same form-factor...

[Anonymous Coward]

1TB My Passport SE

Bought one of these a couple weeks ago, actually got quite a surprise that 1TB was available on a 2.5" drive as I was expecting to just get a 750GB one (psx suddenly had need of some external storage.. /whistle)

Been fairly impressed with it so far, it does go to sleep fairly quick, but not so fast as to be a problem at all, runs from a single USB plug too, which I do much, much prefer.

[Russ Tarbox]

2 hour video?

What kind of measurement is that without information on encoding, resolution and so on? All two hour videos are not equal, as anyone who has had to sit through a Jennifer Lopez movie will know :(

[zedenne]

title required

3TB on a single drive! when i was growing up we were lucky to have 1kb! and even then we lived in a hole in't road and were so grateful to have more that 512 bytes we would kill ourselves every evening etc.

[James O'Brien]

You have to remember

Also in our days the great Gates himself stated we wouldnt need more then 640K memory.

What I want to know is when will we see this in an internal option as a RAID drive? The Green drive just suck. Slow, unstable in RAIDs, did I mention slow? Plus the warranty on the enterprise level drives is typically alot better then what you get for consumer grade or external drives....

[Greg Glawitsch]

"Seagate has some catching up to do" - wrong: Seagate already offers 3TB drives

Seagate announced their external 3TB drives (which, unfortunately, only feature a USB 2.0 interface out of the box) more than 3 months ago and they are available everywhere.

I have, so far, bought two of them, and removed the disks from their enclosures and stuck them into a Linux-powered computer. After formatting, each drive has about 2.7 TB net capacity, for a total of (so far) 5.4 TB.

Thus, the line "Seagate has some catching up to do" is just plain wrong - right now it's Hitachi and Samsung who have some catching up to do.

[frankgobbo]

Catching up to do

I think that's in reference to the platters.. Seagate required 5 platters to do 3TB, WD has a 4 platter drive; hence, Seagate have some catching up to do.

But yes, Samsung and Hitachi presently don't offer a 3TB disk and none of them offer a SATA option for me to install in my Thecus NAS..

[stim]

mediabox

i find the green power drives great in a mediabox, they stream video and music content perfectly & run nice and cool (which helps when there's 6 of them packed into one machine) - true there is a little delay when they are coming out of sleep, but for the purposes of a mediabox, this delay is not a problem.

i personally wouldn't use them in the enterprise or a demanding power-munching machine...

[Jay 2]

Same here

I'm using 2 x 1TB Green drives in my Mac Pro, one for a scratch drive and one for TimeMachine. They can take a few seconds to wake up, but are fine after.