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WD's 2TB Green giant can't jam hardness into standard slot

Little big boy

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WD has added a 2TB Green small form factor drive to its line-up.

The Tweaktown website has a picture of the drive in a Japanese retail store.

WD's website says it is 15mm thick – meaning it won't fit in standard 2.5inch drive bays you'd find in a laptop or netbook; comes in 1.5TB and 2TB versions; and has a 3Gbit/s SATA interface with a 8MB cache. With its Intellipower rotation, meaning something around 5,500rpm, it is for secondary storage applications.

WD Green 2TB SFF drive

WD image of 2TB Green SFF drive.

WD's own picture of the drive indicates it is a 4-platter unit. WD did have a 2TB Scorpio Blue, spinning at 5,400rpm, but, after the colour-coding branding came to the fore, the Blue SFF line maxes out at 1TB. It looks as if the 2TB Scorpio Blue has effectively become the 2TB Green drive. ®

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Perhaps it's not actually meant to be an over the counter, retail item at all.

Could it be aimed at consumer electronics applications like PVRs, music servers, or even games consoles? If given big enough numbers WD can shave a couple of percent off the cost of these beasties by not squeezing them into a slightly smaller box then I can't see that a non-standard form factor is going to worry the likes of Sony et-al and they may even see not letting the user swap in a commodity replacement when the original fails (or a capacity upgrade is needed) as an advantage...

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Re: Won't fit a laptop ?

Clearly you've not worked with any servers recently.

Most take 2.5 inch drives now, at least the ones from Dell we have do; and there is a little room - Though I *would* be concerned about changes in airflow as a lot of this kit takes the air in via the drive bays...

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Chocolate Teanot

It's standard enterprise drive size, like the VelociRaptor 300Gb (also 15mm), but instead of speed, it's built for capacity, you could use it to replace a tape backup solution (low power, high capacity, faster than tape), for the price, failed drives can be considered "consumable", at the moment we do disk to disk backups, and then backup the copy to tape (minimal downtime, or zero downtime minimal I/O impact), but the disk is expensive, this is "a" solution.

I suspect (as a previous poster said), this is obviously not designed for laptops, there are many other appliances such as PVRs (I have CCTV recorder and audio jukebox that this would fit in), and of course, you could fit it in a 3.5" bay with an adaptor, combined with it's low power and better airflow it would be much cooler too, I wonder if they would fit in iMacs?

Don't forget that WD are also building the ultra slim 7mm drives too, this isn't a killer product, it's a very specific one, just one for a complete range of products.

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