2TB Caviar drive too good to be true?
Quite right - but Czech website blows the gaff
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A Czech website is listing a 2TB WD Caviar drive for sale, although the current largest capacity WD Caviar drive is 1TB. Don't bother trying to order one of these 2TB whoppers though - they aren't available yet.
What's happened is that someone in receipt of a non-disclosure presentation has disclosed the information to the Czechs - you can read about the forthcoming drive here. Naturally, the site says that their warehouse has none in stock.
The Caviar Green WD20EADS - 2TB product is described as a 3.5-inch, SATA II drive (3Gbit/s I/O), spinning at 7,200rpm and priced at 5,943 Kč (Czech koruna) before VAT. In real money this is about €230, meaning about £230, before VAT.
We're ostensibly looking at a 4-platter drive with 500GB/platter areal density or a 3-platter unit at a totally amazing 666GB/platter. However, comments on the Czech website, admittedly not translated by anything cleverer than AltaVista Babelfish, suggest that the capacity is actually measured at 1000B/KB instead of 1024 bytes/KB, which would make the drive capacity about 1.86TB and not 2TB. That would give around 445GB/platter for a 4-platter unit and 620GB/platter for a 3-platter unit. Anything at the 600GB+ per platter level would be awesome and unlikely.
WD's position is "We don't announce products until we are shipping", and the company is definitely not shipping.
We reckon it's a 4-platter unit coming down the WD Pike and Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda is about to get pipped in the capacity stakes. If WD is running NDAs on the product now, that suggests an announcement will be made in the next month or three. All will be revealed then. ®
COMMENTS
Actually
IBM disk were sold till 2000 in heavy Gb (1024^3 B.)
The stopped that as I believe they were the last ones and loosing business form it. I do believe I still have 120 GB drives in Heavy GB while the 250 are if I remember right light Gb (10e9 B)
Old news
I remember when 30MB was a *big* hard drive (early '80s) - and even then most manufacturers used million sized mega bytes rather than real ones.
It was often claimed at the time, that this was due to the drives not being error free, and the process of mapping out bad sectors (ah, the joys of ST506 interfaced drives) would lose some of the advertised capacity. By redefining mega to mean 10^6 freed the makers from claims of false advertising when their 20MB drive did not always give the full advertised capacity.
@Steve Evans
Speaking only of 3.5 inch IDE and SCSI hard disk drives, I clearly remember the unit changing in approx 1995. Disks were available in the several hundred megabyte range, a megabyte was 1024^2. When the unit was changed fine print stating that 1MB=1000000 was added to the packaging for retail disks. At the same time the stated capacities did a modest jump. IIRC Quantum did it first and the others shortly followed. This was commented upon in the PC press and by hard drive manufacturers.
I have no comment about floppies.
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