Platform Trends: Hard Drives Get Bigger, Faster, and Greener

After a bit of a lull, the hard drive market is now firing on all cylinders, setting new capacity records, aiming for greener pastures, and even putting drive performance in the black. The biggest surprise is the two companies heading these new developments, as perennial leader Seagate is taking a back seat to Western Digital and Samsung.

Western Digital Hits 2TB

The big news last week was Western Digital's breaking the 1.5TB barrier to deliver a full 2TB of capacity in a single hard drive. The company has also achieved this under its Caviar Green brand, which keeps power requirements and thermals low, as opposed to WD's Blue (standard) and Black (performance) lines. On the spec sheet, Western Digital lists the new drive's rpm as "IntelliPower," which means a variable rate between 5,400 and 7,200 rpm based on usage algorithms.

Similarly, WD uses the IntelliSeek label instead of a specific seek time, as the latter can vary based on how the drive calculates optimum seek speeds. The rest of the Caviar Green's specifications include 32MB of onboard cache, perpendicular magnetic recording and -- in the 2TB model only -- a new StableTrac motor shaft for reduced vibration. The company covers the drive with a three-year warranty, which is the industry standard although shy of the five years that Seagate offers on basic desktop drives.

The new 2TB model is a standard 3.5-inch form factor, with support for the latest SATA 3Gb/sec interface. Although Western Digital does not officially publish the number of platters in its specifications, the current 500GB/platter standard would translate into a standard four-platter design, or three platters for the 1.5TB Caviar Green. Drive acoustics are good for the class, at 25 dBA at idle and between 26 and 29 decibels at seek. Power usage is also relatively low, with 7.4 watts for full read/write operation, 3.9 watts at idle, and 1.1 watts in standby/sleep modes.

The 1.5TB and 2TB Caviar Greens do, however, have higher power usage than their 500GB and 1TB siblings, which draw as little as 5.4 watts in operation and 0.4 watt on standby. So the drive isn't really as green previous models. And 2TB certainly doesn't come cheap, as the WD debuted at a price of $300, or a bit more than a pair of Seagate 1.5TB drives.

Back in Black

While not a brand-new announcement, the Western Digital Caviar Black line has staged something of a performance revolution in the hard disk market. Sure, if you want to hang out at the razor's edge, WD's 10,000-rpm VelociRaptor drives are the ultimate, but they're still limited to a 300GB maximum capacity and can be very pricey. The Caviar Black, on the other hand, offers a 1TB maximum capacity and noticeable performance improvements over standard 7,200-rpm models for only a small price premium.

Western Digital has achieved this through an innovative a dual-processor architecture that helps manage the onboard cache, handle the data fetch algorithms, and reduce overall drive latencies. Other Caviar Black design elements are suitably high-end, including a 32MB cache, a StableTrac drive motor, NoTouch ramp load technology, and a five-year warranty.

These drives are the top performers in the 7200-rpm segment, but the crown has its costs: In addition to a slight price premium, Caviar Black users have to deal with higher power usage and louder drive acoustics. Power consumption at read/write is 8.4 watts, dipping by hardly half a watt at idle. The drives are noticeably louder, checking in at 24 dBA at idle and 29 to 33 dBA at seek. (These specifications are for the three-platter 750GB and 1TB models; the two-platter 500GB and 640GB Caviar Blacks do somewhat better.)

Samsung's Jolly Green Giant

Western Digital is not the only company introducing new drives. Samsung got into the act with a 1.5TB (500GB times three platters) behemoth dubbed EcoGreen F2, an environmentally friendly model with all sorts of power-usage and acoustic-management features. These hard drives are not about outright performance, but look to supply a low-noise, low-power desktop product without sacrificing capacity.

Samsung achieves this not via variable rotation speed like the Caviar Green's, but by building a straight 5,400-rpm drive instead of a 7,200-rpm model. This obviously has a impact on benchmark performance, but Samsung has augmented the EcoGreen F2 with high-end features such as 32MB of onboard cache, the 3.0Gb/sec SATA interface, and an 8.9-millisecond average seek time.

Read/write power usage is only 6.3 watts, dropping to only 1 watt in sleep and standby modes. Samsung gives acoustic specifications in bels, which are not comparable to decibels, but the EcoGreen 1.5TB should be quieter (2.5 and 2.8 bels at idle and seek, respectively) than the already near-silent SpinPoint F1 (2.7 and 2.9 bels, ditto).

The projected retail price of approximately $130 is also very competitive for a 1.5TB drive, with WD's Caviar Green 2TB selling for $300 and even the affordable Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB in the $140-$150 range. Paying $260 for 3TB of disk space is not a bad deal.

Where Is Seagate?

After checking out all the product news on the storage scene, our first thought was to wonder what Seagate was doing while WD and Samsung were redefining the market. Seagate has traditionally been the leader when it comes to new hard-drive developments, but has let its rivals take the spotlight this year. Sure, Seagate released an updated Barracuda 7200.12 family earlier this month, but that was just a 500GB/platter refresh that currently tops out at 1TB.

Part of this is due to the quality-control challenges Seagate is having with its popular Barracuda 7200.11 line, going so far as to issue a public firmware update, and the rest can be attributed to the company falling behind in some very key areas. While Western Digital has been diversifying its products into four distinct desktop groups (Blue, Black, Green, and Raptor), and Samsung is working out a similar strategy, Seagate's Barracuda 7200 series is its lone desktop entry. That just doesn't cut it in 2009.