WD 2TB EARS drives in stock at Newegg

[bubbaQ]

WD 2TB EARS drives w/ 64MB cache in stock at Newegg

 

  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514

[bubbaQ]

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.

[wholly]

Some performance comparisons here: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?p=4163208

[dib]

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

[bubbaQ]

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.

[WeeboTech]

Interesting, I was expecting it to perform better.

[bubbaQ]

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!