WD's Monster 2TB Caviar Green Drive, Preview Test 454
MojoKid writes "Today Western Digital is announcing their WD20WEADS drive, otherwise known as
the WD Caviar Green 2.0TB. With 32MB of onboard cache and special power management algorithms that balance spindle speed and transfer rates, the WD Caviar Green 2TB not only breaks the 2 terabyte barrier but also offers an extremely low-power
profile in its standard 3.5" SATA footprint. Early testing shows it keeps pace with similar capacity drives from Seagate and Samsung."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfect (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:backups (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell do you do to back up your 2TB drive?
2 other 2TB drives?
backups-Blowups. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless they're all the same model made in Thailand.
Re:backups (Score:3, Insightful)
Another 2TB drive. They're cheap enough to keep a spare around.
The problem with that is of course that mirroring simply mirrors problems on the primary drive to the secondary drive. So you end up with two working drives with broken data on it.
It's the data you want backed up, not the drive.
Fools say it's DANGEROUS! (Score:4, Insightful)
Every time a new, larger drive comes out, people say, "That much data in one drive is dangerous!"
So here's what you do. Go buy ten 200GB drives. RAID them together. Who do you think will lose data, you, with ten times the possible failure points, or me with only one?
Just back it up, biznatch!
Re:backups (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood this argument. Say you have N drives each with capacity C/N (e.g. C=2TB, N=1 for this new drive, or C=500GB, N=4 as you prefer) and probability P of each drive failing in a given time interval. Your expected data loss is N*P*C/N, which is independent of N. So what's the gain from more drives?
Heck, assume you don't want the hassle of multiple partitions so you use logical volume management to concatenate the drives (simulating the larger disk). Since any failure kills the whole thing, it's even worse - N*P*C.
I guess maybe your are thinking of RAID5? But is this an enterprise-class hard drive? I'm not buying (or buying electricity for) 3x 1TB drives instead of 1x 2TB drive just to protect my PVR recordings. And since RAID (regardless of level) is not a backup, if the data is any more important than PVR recordings, you still need backups with or without RAID. So all RAID5 gives you is decreased time to recover from a broken drive, by making you buy a spare up front. Obviously decreased downtime is critical for an important server, but not for the vast majority of home PCs.
Re:backups (Score:5, Insightful)
Except RAID isn't a backup, so your data isn't that "safe and happy".
More room... or backup? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with a larger drive is I fill it quickly. Should I buy a 2TB drive and use it to backup my already full two 1TB drives, or should I just add storage? Oh, the agony!
I'll lose less data (Score:4, Insightful)
My RAID setup would use drives from different manufacturers and production lots, and contain hot spares.
Good foil for Seagate (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be nice to have someone besides Seagate in this space.
Perhaps they will be motivated to get their act together. If they
don't those of us that buy these kinds of drives at least have an
alternate vendor now.
Mine's Better! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:backups (Score:4, Insightful)
You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many backups. At least I get the chance to do one out of three....
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Congratulations. You have just stated that powers of 10 are "arbitrary metrics created by beaurocrats[sic] on a power trip."
Let me explain this in simple terms:
Powers are two are convenient for machines.
Powers of ten are convenient for humans.
It's bad form to present data in an inconvenient format for the user (which, presumably, is human) no matter how "computationally convenient" your algorithm may be. You can use binary calculations all you want behind the scenes, but convert it to a format designed for human comprehension before displaying it to a human.
Performance looks surprisingly good! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm still not convinced going green on the HDD will save energy as it drops 10 watts on your total load. In an array of arrays, there may be savings though. Gamers, remember, your power supply/CPU/video card are the biggest culprits. Lower power will generally equate to lower hear and thus less breakdowns though.
I'll wait a few months to see if there are recalls. If there are none, this drive looks like a winner.
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument would carry more weight if the manufacturers were doing this for the benefit of humans. In fact, they mix units - using the 1024-standard units for cache. Tell me mixing units is friendly! :)
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me explain this is detailed, complicated-for-you, terms.
Exponents are useful for counting possible combinations. Computers are logically binary and quantum. When dealing with storage, we use 1024, because it represents the number of possible configurations of a 10-bit sequence.
2^10 was chosen for convenience - it was close to 1000, which people are used to working with, and it provided a good separation between major units.
1000 was chosen by SI for reasons just as arbitrary, namely providing a good spacing. We have scalar units of 10 (decimeter, decameter, for example), but no one ever says "Go down the road 1.2 deca kilometers".
SI units (major units based on a factor 1000, with shitty units based on 10 for completeness) are for measuring.
Computery units, (major based on a factor of 1024, with minor units based on 2 as the basis), are for counting.
This is why clock speeds use 1000, not 1024. Clock speeds are traditionally measured, and not counted, and they do not operate on a binary quantum system.
This is why data storage is SUPPOSED to be described using 1024, while data transfer is described using 1000.
If you want to get down to it, all SI units are retarded, since the universe is quantum (it is). All measurements are merely inaccurate tools of convenience, and everything should be counted in universal quantums of space (Planck Length? I doubt it, unless it really is tortoises all the way down), time, etc.
To sum it up - SI is not right because it's "official". SI is WRONG for computer science. And if the universe is quantum, SI is technically wrong for everything. Calculus, too.
Re:backups (Score:2, Insightful)
You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many backups. At least I get the chance to do one out of three....
Say that again when your critical organs start failing from a lack fatty tissue in your body.
Western Digital past experience (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not think I will be buying this one, or another WD. It is really hard to witness so many dead hard drives (including many DOA) and have your own experiences with their hard drives that just die so quickly. And another thing, why is every WD so damn big? They squeeze into every slot you put them into, not just slide in nicely like any Seagate (or most other brands). This goes for desktop and laptop. No wonder they are making their own external drives. Generic ones may not even fit their drives.
I have had much success with Seagate (lasts 5 years or more) and Hitachi (louder than most HDDs but they last). I do not know the warranty of WD, but the warranty for both Seagate and Hitachi are great (especially the Seagate one).
I am sure some people have luck, but after 2 dead hard drives (and many DOAs at a shop I worked at) and physical size problems, I will probably never give WD another chance, no matter what the price.
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, I suppose you are correct in your view. From now on, a foot is ten inches because a unit of measure not based on tens is inconvenient. After all, the metric system works exactly this way. Also, there will be ten hours per day, ten days in a week and ten weeks in a month... and of course ten months in a year which, for me, makes "December" far less confusing since the Dec in December means ten in the first place.
Yes, that is sarcasm. To me, a unit of measure, no matter how inconvenient, is a unit of measure. You do NOT change the unit of measure. You create a NEW unit of measure.
So to that end, I propose a new unit of measure for hard drives: LTC-KB
This would make the difference between KB and LTC-KB much more obvious. A KB is 1024 bytes. (A Kb is 1024 bits just so you know.) A MB is 1024 KB, or 1024 x 1024 bytes, and a TB is 1024 MB, or 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. A LTC-KB is 1000 bytes, a LTC-MB is 1000 LTC-KB and a LTC-TB is 1000 LTC-MB.
Oh, forgive me for not mentioning earlier, but LTC means "Lie To Consumers."
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
SI might be wrong for computer science, but SI prefixes have standard meanings. If we want prefixes that work better for computing (which we may well), then making new ones, just to be clear, is a good idea. Then if SI is wrong you don't have to use it, and you don't confuse everyone by using its terminology to mean something slightly different (which is much worse than using it to mean something very different).
Anyway, the power-of-two units make some calculations easier and many harder. Just because an N-bit MUX has 2^N inputs doesn't mean they'll all be connected to something. You have 4 384-byte memory modules, quick, how many kB? Um, what's 384/1024? 3/8 maybe? Having to mess with mutliplying/dividing by 1024 in the middle of back-of-the-napkin calculations where not every number is a simple power of 2 (even if many of them have lots of 0s at the end in binary, like 384 does) actually does suck unless you just give in and learn your multiplication tables in hex (if I was still doing driver programming I probably would have done just that).
Re:Street date? (Score:3, Insightful)
FTA: Price is $299, street date is "as fast as the trucks can get them there". THe first ones will probably be online.
PS: 2Tb for $299...!
I remember paying that much for 200Mb and thinking it was an incredible bargain compared to the old 20Mb drives (which cost thousands).
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Well binary units make sense for the size of solid state memories because they were almost always produced in power of two sizes (for good reasons, if they weren't the address decode logic would be a LOT more complex). Binary kilobytes also made sense for floppies since they were usually an integer number of power of two sized sectors.
And if your OS is already using a measuring system for memory and floppies doesn't it make sense to also use it for hard drives? MS clearly thought so. Unfortunately the hard drive vendors throught differently (whether for technical reasons or because it allowed them to advertise higher capacities is unclear) and so we ended up with two different systems in wide use.
Worse with each unit we go up the discrepancy gets worse. At kilo it was only 2.4% , at terra it's nearly 10%.
Re:Street date? (Score:3, Insightful)
Already on sale in Australia [engadget.com], at about US$250.
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, yeah, except that just about everything is stored on powers of two. This is as absurd as if hot dogs were sold in packages of 8 (or 1024) and buns were sold in packages of 10 (or 1000). AND they used the same term to describe both, until it got to the point where they could sell significantly less than was expected while using VERY small print to notify us of this change in wording.
There is absolutely NO reason to use base 10 numbering for computer memory of any kind, except that it allows manufacturers to use bigger numbers while selling less. The only mitigating factor is that now that they all do it, at least we're back to comparing apples to apples.
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Now explain flash/solid state memory sizes and the "formatted capacity" of memory.
At a low level flash chips have a row/column nature similar to DRAM, but there is additional complexity because some operations target a larger "erase block" rather than an individual byte.
Some embedded platforms present a raw interface to the flash memory and require the host operating system to provide support for bad blocks and wear-levelling. These would be specified in "MiB" along with a certain allowable percentage of bad blocks.
However, the more familiar approach (e.g. in a SD card) is to include an embedded microcontroller that presents a logical block interface to the host. This controller skips over the bad blocks, and also needs to use some of the good blocks to keep track of the logical-to-physical block mapping. Here it makes more sense to use SI notation.
I just checked an "8 GB" microSD card and found that it presents a capacity of 7969177600 bytes to the OS (before partitioning). So 0.4% of the rated capacity is not available to me. This is consistent with the typical fine print on the package, e.g. "Some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions, and thus is not available for data storage" (from Sandisk's website). If the manufacturer had sold it as an "8 GiB" card I would be more upset because that would represent a 7.3% capacity loss.
Re:Powers of 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
No one gives a shit whether your measurement system is 'correct', as long as it's consistent. SI is VERY consistent for a system that spans so many fields. That's why it's better than the US customary system.
There's nothing inherent to today's storage technologies that requires power-of-two capacities. We're not even using a fraction of the address space we already have, so sticking to a power-of-two size doesn't have any real benefits.
Oh, so Computer Science is so important that we get to invent our own units, and use the same names as established SI units? Please. If you want to use binary units because they are convenient, go ahead and do so. But DON'T call them "tera", "giga", or "mega"; these terms already have SPECIFIC meanings and you can't just hijack them.
Here in the real world (Score:3, Insightful)
We dont want to spend a bazillion dollars to buy a tape drive for home use. "Offsite" is not an answer either because our internet isn't fast enough, and there exists no cheap media to backup 2TB of data. DVD only holds like 4 gigs so you'd need about 500 or so of those. Blu-ray might make that 50 disks or so.
The proper answer for the backup of any media at home is "buy another hard drive and copy to that". Any other suggestion, such as a $3,000 tape drive that still only holds 800GB (!!!) is academic, pedantic, impractical or all three.
Short answer: basically, there is no good answer. Buying a second drive is the best we have these days.