I was poking around Newegg and saw a new flavor of the WD Caviar Black 2TB.

 

Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB (WD2001FASS)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136456

 

Now has 64MB cache... and Tom's hardware gave it good reviews, and it outperforms even the VRaptors.

 

  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-3.html

 

That's right... out performs the VRaptor.

 

Also comes in a RAID edition optimized for 7x24 operation (probably with TLER too).  However it is $100 more than the EARS Green version.

Thanks, Bubba. If only it weren't quite so expensive. The Black versions of the 500 GB and 1 TB drives are so much more resonably priced - a small premium over the green drives. I've wanted one of these as my parity drive for so long, but was holding out for price drops in the 2 TB versions. Maybe the older black ones will come down in price finally. I'll buy at $200.

I've also been looking at this drive as a new parity disk - but they're even more expensixe in Denmark where I live 

Yeah I see them for sale here in the UK for £230 which is over double the price of other 2TB drives, since the only benefit for me would be faster parity checks I don't think I'll bother.

With the deskstar 7200rpm 1/2 the price, the Sata III Seagate XT 10% cheaper I cant see many takers at those prices.

I have to agree.  When Fry's sells their Deskstars at $130 every few weeks, I pick one up.  It's so much cheaper and only mildly lower speed compared to a black.  From what I have read the 64mb cache is stellar for what we all do, but I expect to see that on 3 TB drives in the next few months anyway.  Also, from what I have read, the RAID versions of those drives are more trouble than they're worth.

I wasn't recommending buying one... I was just pointing it out because w/ 4x500GB platters and 64MB of cache, it benchmarked faster than the VRaptors... and that is hopefully boding well for things to come in hard drives.

 

Another negative is that the run 10 degrees or more hotter than the 2TB green drives.

Keep in mind, if most of your access is sequential, you're still limited to the speed of both drives involved in the write.

 

If your access is more simultaneous and random, such as something done with vmware, bittorrent or transcoding, you "may" see a performance boost, but only on operations which involve more then one drive.

 

Would I buy this if it were more cost effective, Yes.

I do bittorrent and allot of other operations on my unRAID array all at the same time.

 

For a general media server, reading a number of streams and writing a large file or two, there may not be much of a performance gain noticed.

 

I'm still waiting for the 2TB 64MB cache 7200 RPM drives to be cost effective before I move out of the 1.5TB drives and onto 2TB drives.  Although the Deskstar at the $130 range is very inviting.

weebo, I've benchmarked the Hitachi 2tb and updated the user benhmarks in the Wiki if your interested in numbers on it.