WD intros 'world's first' 2TB portable HDD
SuperSpeeder
WD has outed what it claims is the world's first portable hard drive with a 2TB capacity.
The drive is part of WD's My Passport line, and sports a redesigned shell - available in a choice of five colours - and SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connectivity.
Bundled software allows you to password-protect the drive's contents and to automatically back-up your Windows PC's documents and media files to the drive when it's connected.
The 2TB versions costs £230 including VAT - $250 minus sales tax in States - and WD is also offering 500GB, 750GB and 1TB drives for less. They're available now from WD's online shop and its many retailers. ®
COMMENTS
I'll take 100
If you can get a 2TB portable (that's 2.5 inch) hard drive for £90 I will take 100 of them - I'll even give you £100 each.
I expect you didn't read (or understand) the article.
So what are all those 3tb ones then?
I'm assuming they mean 2.5"? 'cause there are plenty of 3.5" ones around and they are very portable.... I know, I have one!
Wow
It takes literally two clicks from this article to get to the specs page where you can see the physical size.
It's a 2.5" drive. If you can get those for £90 right now then hats off to you as you're obviously making a fortune selling them on for profit.
You forgot the WD My Passport badge on the outside.
</joke>
(Although in my opinion that should make the drive practically worthless. Any drive that pretends that it doesn't exist at all for several minutes if it encounters a CRC error reading from the disk is bad in my book. It is fine if they want the drive to try to re-read the sectors to see if the error is recoverable, but for the whole disk to go unservicable for an unlimited number of minutes while it does it is not acceptable)
RE>Time to write full drive
Consumer 2.5" drives mostly come in 5200 or 7200rmp. There are plenty of benchmark results out there of each brand and flavour for you to explore.
Whilst not as fast as 3.5" drives, even a 2.5" 5200rpm 2TB drive is going to have a sustained average(AVERAGE across writing the whole 2TB) write speed of around 40-45MB/s. Which when compared to say a Eco/Green edition desktop 5200rpm drive which has around 50-60MB/s, isn't too bad at all.
I'll let you do the math, but to say "days" is ludicrous. Well under 8 hours is realistic.
So what determines drive speeds?
Spindle size (Outer rim of a 2.5" platter spins slower than that of a 3.5", more data passes the head in same time on 3.5")
Spindle rotation speed (self explanitory)
Head seek time (mechanics of moving the head into position to read/write)
Cache ram on the drive(for bursts of predicted data reads/read-ahead reads and writes)
I know these are advertised as external USB units but as for "the bare drive inside":
Personally, 4 of these in a 5.25" 4-drive hot-swap unit, raid 5, even if they were only 5200rpm is a nice prospect, just need them to drop in price a little. You can get one for about £60 if that appeals to you too, which takes 4x 9.5-15mm high 2.5" drives.
Now if you want something with a bigger bang get yourself a 10000rmp SAS drive but dont expect to run if off of your usb unpowered!
