WD Launches Monster 3TB Internal HDD But Not For Windows XP

Western Digital (WD) has unveiled what it claims is the largest capacity internal SATA hard disk drive on the market. It works on Windows 7 and Vista as secondary storage or boot disk for 64-bit versions. It is incompatible with Windows XP.

This will be the largest single internal hard disk drive on the market though Seagate Technology unveiled an external 3TB hard drive earlier this year.

As part of the WD Caviar Green family, the disk drive will ship in 3TB and 2.5TB sizes, the company said. The hardware limitations mean they will be used primarily as secondary, internal storage but they can also be used as external drives.

Battling With Solid-State Drives

Industry watchers have worried about the impact on the HDD business as companies shift away from the trusty magnetic disk drives toward faster and more rugged flash-based alternatives. The immense popularity of mobile devices and tablets has also impacted PC and laptop sales.

“We remain concerned that consequent to the ‘tablet invasion’, the PC segment is likely to stay weak for all HDD vendors in the historically stronger second half of this calendar year,” ThinkEquity analyst Rajesh Ghai wrote in a research note recently.

Both versions of the Caviar Green drive will include 64MB of cache and features SATA 3.0Gbit/s connectivity. The higher capacity comes about as a result of WD increasing the areal density to 750GB per platter, the company said in a statement. The drive also uses Advanced Format technology, which writes 4,096 bytes per data sector.

There are several multi-terabyte storage options currently available, usually by stringing at least two drives together in a RAID array. What makes this single internal drive notable is the sheer size of its available storage.

Hard disk drives have been kept at 2.19TB or smaller because of several hardware, firmware, and software support issues, according to Western Digital. To overcome these barriers, Western Digital is using the latest industry standards and specifications, which result in some restrictions on how the drive can be used. For example, the Caviar Green drive can only be used as a boot drive on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Motherboards will need to be relatively new, with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface support to properly detect the drive and its total available storage.  However, for older non-UEFI machines, Western Digital will bundle the new Caviar Green hard drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA) so that the operating system will be able to use known drivers to properly support the drive.

“Customers will be able to take advantage of this breakthrough capacity point now for secondary external storage in legacy 32-bit systems that run on Microsoft Vista or Windows 7 platforms,” said Jim Morris, executive vice president and general manager of WD’s client systems storage group.

WD Caviar Green drives are considered eco-friendly, with less power consumption thanks to lower operating temperatures, decreased acoustical noise for make the PC much quieter, and improved performance.

“With our WD Caviar Green drives, we enable energy-conscious customers to build systems with the highest capacities that deliver the optimal balance of system performance, ensured reliability and energy conservation,” said Morris.

The WD Caviar Green 2.5TB and 3TB hard drives are currently available in the US but European shipping dates have not been announced. The suggested retail price for the 2.5 TB $189 and the 3 TB hard drive is $239.