2TB Caviar drive too good to be true?

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. ®