WD has announced the first 2 terabyte (TB) hard drive – the world’s highest capacity drive.
The device is the latest addition to WD’s environmentally friendly Caviar Green hard drive family.
This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD’s 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) with 32 MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2 TB.
Mark Geenen, president of Trend Focus, said there were some in the industry who wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive.
He said that already some 10 per cent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher.
They served demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries.
"The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user’s insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives," he said.
External storage solutions are a common place for extreme-capacity drives to help consumers manage these media libraries.
The WD Caviar Green 2 TB will be available later this month at select resellers and distributors for Euro 299.00.
This week, WD also reported revenue of USD $1.8 billion, on shipments of approximately 35.5 million units and net income of USD $14 million, or $0.06 per share, for its fiscal second quarter ended 26 December, 2008.
The company’s results include charges of USD $113 million associated with the restructuring plan announced on 17 December.
Excluding the restructuring charges and the related tax benefit of USD $4 million, non-GAAP net income was USD $123 million or $0.55 per share.