WD launches 2TB drive with 64MB cache

...WD can live up to the claim of power reduction AND performance -- I purchased an OEM green 500G drive a year or so ago and wasn't thrilled with its performance at all... the trouble was that the disk was constantly spinning down ..
i a biased WD fanboi - so we will see if they can pull this one off and hold back the SSD rush for another year

If the change from 32MB to 64MB of cache would really bring up to 25% performance improvement, they would have implemented it a long while ago on other drives.

It's just marketing, hard drives are still severely limited by random seek times and random read/writes and for that cache doesn't bring much improvement.

Maybe when they combine a 2-3TB drive with a 1-2GB of SSD as cache, it would be another thing.

A 10GB M-RAM cache with <1ns latency
would be nice.

yes I'm inclined to agree on the cache front. I'm pretty sure all the major HDD makers have tested in their labs HDDs with a Gb or more of ram cache on them to see how they perform. Why wouldnt you? What else have you got to do in a HDD R&D lab with the SSD dept getting all the glory?

All it is is a marketing/selling point.

I dont think cache has had a major effect since it went from 8Mb. Platter density is more important.

2TB is the limit anyhow...for the moment.
The MBR is limited to 2TB, so they have to find something else to differentiate.

GPT enables over 2TB, but the majority of people wouldn't have a GPT capable system.

There will be 2TB drives for quite a while...

If you really want to make a drive interesting, stick 1GB+ of cache in there. Use the cache actively and include enough capacitors to power the drive long enough to write whatever data is held there if the system should suddenly lose power.

...tired of hard drive failures. bring on the SSDs

A GB of regular RAM (static or dynamic) would not be good unless the disk comes with a battery backed power supply. Capacitors cannot store enough charge per volume to provide the current for a disk drive and the memory after a failure of the external power supply (or after the computer is being switched off!), in particular not for DRAM. However, 1 GB of FRAM would do the trick (forget about flash memory). But who can afford that? Maybe our kids. ;-)

Jason, WTF is a "Gb", or an "Mb"?

-- his caps-lock prolly isnt workin' --no need to get all technical on his ass

These drives have a factory locked speed of something between 5400rpm and 7200rpm.

If you are as technical as you think you should know what Gb and Mb is ... AND be able to do the conversions!

Or you can not be a superior ---, and understand what he was saying from the context? Either way, give it a rest.

FYI to one of the earlier posters - there is a significant difference in performance between the first gen 'green' WD drive and the 2nd gen one. In addition to the density which lead to fewer platters and faster performance, I believe they made a couple of other changes.

Funny thing is, it was WD who said just last year that 16mb cache is all they'll use on their now standard blue drives as 32mb cache provides no performance benefit...

I think due to the slowness of the green drives more cache could be beneficial depending on how the data is laid out on the disk. The higher cache may help the more random read/writes with the right processing of requests (and the use of NCQ)

Hey Marius, the vague 25% performance boost was from the overall design not just the cache. STR probably went up 25%.
When will they start supporting SATA 300MB/s ?