Western Digital appears to be accelerating its 2TB 3.5-inch drive from 5400rpm to 7200rpm if a weekend wave of European hard disk drive etailing mentions are to be believed.

WD introduced a desktop 2TB Caviar Green [1] drive at the beginning of the year. Then there came an enterprise WD RE4-GP [2] 2TB drive in April, and both rotated at 5400rpm. There have been rumours [3] of a 7200rpm 2TB Caviar Black drive, with a Japanese promotion card mentioning it in June.

With the weekend's wave of web mentions, for example, here [4], it appears that a part at least of WD's European reseller channel is pre-selling the RE3 WD2002FBYS drive.

It is listed as a 2TB and 3.5-inch drive, spinning at 7200rpm, with a 32MB cache, 8.7msecs access time, and 5-year warranty. There are four 500GB platters, which makes it a higher density drive than the Hitachi GST 2TB model [5] announced last week, which needed 5 platters to achieve its 7200rpm speed.

We haven't spotted a delivery date yet but are guessing that it will ship by the end of September, if not before. Prices vary between €260 - €280 (£223 - £240). ®

Links

1. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/27/review_internal_hard_drive_wd_caviar_green_2tb/
2. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/21/wd_greener_2tb/
3. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/27/review_internal_hard_drive_wd_caviar_green_2tb/
4. http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=12&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.knc-computer.com%2Fproducts_new.php%3Flanguage%3Den%26page%3D2%26XTCsid%3D043c4e7efdd71193bf9f024d4c241496&ei=feR_SsurMZXbjQfT_9nwAQ&usg=AFQjCNEWANuQ-xveq6qkUTgoussWDXl8lw&sig2=2A8MQZ3LWYvsHYYVJokyZA
5. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/06/hgst_2tb_deskstar/

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