January 18, 201016 yr WD 2TB EARS drives w/ 64MB cache in stock at Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514
January 21, 201016 yr Author BTW, a little research reveals another difference between the EADS and EARS drives -- the idle power usage of the EARS drives is same as read/write power usage... whereas the EADS drives have about a 50% drop in power consumption when idle.
January 22, 201016 yr Some performance comparisons here: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?p=4163208
January 23, 201016 yr Power usage from the WD site for the EARS drives. If these are true it looks like only the 1TB drive has the same idle and read/write power usage. 1TB Read/Write 5.4 Watts Idle 5.4 Watts 1.5TB Read/Write 6.00 Watts Idle 3.7 Watts 2TB Read/Write 6.00 Watts Idle 3.7 Watts
January 23, 201016 yr Author If these are true it looks like only the 1TB drive has the same idle and read/write power usage. I noticed the same thing after some more research. I also saw some blurbs that the EARS 2TB was actually a 6Gb/s drive internally, and a 6Gb/sec version was going to be released.
January 23, 201016 yr Author Well with four 500GB platters, there is certainly more data per revolution than the 1TB drives.... so that is a plus. I don't know that the 64MB of cache will make a lot of difference in the types of benchmarks you see published.... there is a point of diminishing returns. Nirvana would be a drive where we had access to tweak the read-ahead algorithm on the drive itself!
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