acWestern Digital Announces 2.5 and 3 Terabyte Hard Drives
Just when you thought that 2 terabyte was big enough, Western Digital ups the ante by creating two new storage drives, one is the 2.5 terabyte drive and the other is the 3 terabyte drive. With that type of storage, you could store you whole life in one drive. What’s surprising is that it wasn’t that 3 terabyte wasn’t possible, the biggest problem was that older computers were not capable of recognizing drives that were any bigger than 2.2 terabyte, but WD has solved that problem.
The new drives are part of their Caviar Green collection and can be installed as an internal disk on certain systems but for most everybody else it will probably be better to get the external storage version. The cost of the drive is $239 retail for 3 TB and $189 for the new 2.5 terabyte drive. They both come with a limited 3-year warranty and do not come with any hard drive enclosure.
Do you know what you can do with 3 Terabyte of storage? Well according to Western Digital you will be able to store an impressive 600,000 digital photos. If photos aren’t your thing, but music is, you can store 750,000 MP3 music files. If movies are what floats your boat, and this means a lot of movies, you will have the capacity to store an unbelievable 360 hours of 1080i high-definition or 720p video. When you think in terms of pricing, per gigabyte with the 3 terabyte storage drive, you are paying less than eight cents, with the 2.5 terabyte drive you are paying less than nine cents. That is definitely a deal.
These drives are made in a way that allows a low rpm speed which means it consumes less power and is eco-friendly. This is where they get the word “Green” in the collection name from.
If your computer runs Windows XP, your computer will not have the capability of using either of the drives. This is because older model computers with XP use a totally different partition scheme than newer computers running Windows 7, Vista, or Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The partition scheme used by XP is called master boot record or MBR. This partition is not capable of recognizing any drive that is greater than 2.2 terabyte. Unlike the new operating systems that recognize larger drives using GPT also known as GUID partition table. GPT is part of an industry standard that was created to streamline the boot process. Therefore, any computer that uses a new operating system has the capabilities of using one of the two drives.
In addition, if your computer has a 64-bit system you can install a secondary terabyte internal terabyte drive. This also includes those who have 32-bit Windows 7 and Vista systems. If you decide to purchase the storage drive, make sure you are using and have the correct firmware. Just because your computer is capable of using the new hard drive doesn’t mean it has the correct firmware.