Western Western Digital today released the industry's first 2TB 3.5" hard drive, featuring a massive 500 GB per-platter capacity, which matches the storage density announced by its rival Seagate. The WD20EADS has a formatted capacity of 2,000,398 MB, which is provided across four 500 GB disks that offer a storage density of 400 Gb per square inch - the highest offered in any production drive at this time. The new model is part of the Caviar Green Drive series, which spin their disks at 7200 rpm drive family and promise a maximum data read speed of 111 MB/s. Power consumption is 7.4 watts under load, 4.0 watts when idle and 0.97 watts when in standby, according to WD. The suggested retail price of the WD20EADS is $299. 3-disk and 2 disk versions with three or two platters and 1.5 TB or 1 TB capacities are available as well. Seagate has recently announced its 12th generation Barracuda series, featuring 500GB platters, so it might launch its own 2TB drive soon, this time around hopefully without messed up firmware ;)

In related news, Hothardware has posted a quick-take look at the 2TB HDD:

A quick glance at the numbers here show this new big-boy Caviar Green drive from WD offering more than competitive performance versus the likes of Samsung's Spinpoint F1 and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 -- both 7200RPM-based products. HD Tach shows an average read speed of 90MB/s and average writes at 80MB/s. We'll be digging into performance metrics with other tools like IOMeter in the days ahead but this early view certainly looks good for a disk with this sort of capacity. We'll be looking at power as well but WD claims this drive drops in somewhere around 7 Watts under read/write load and 5 Watts at idle. With the ever-increasing demand for bulk storage, this new WD drive offers a smaller carbon footprint as well, with a full 2TB available in a single 3.5" drive.