WD's 2TB Green giant can't jam hardness into standard slot WD has added a 2TB Green small form factor drive to its line-up. The Tweaktown website has a picture of the drive in a Japanese retail store. WD's website says it is 15mm thick – meaning it won't fit in standard 2.5inch drive bays you'd find in a laptop or netbook; comes in 1.5TB and 2TB versions; and has a 3Gbit/s SATA …
the drives that go into servers are already thicker than laptop drives however they tend to spin a bit faster than 5500RPM
This drive would be OK as an external I'm just not sure what kind of application you're going to want on 5500RPM drives that would benefit from the 2.5" form factor.
Perhaps it's not actually meant to be an over the counter, retail item at all.
Could it be aimed at consumer electronics applications like PVRs, music servers, or even games consoles? If given big enough numbers WD can shave a couple of percent off the cost of these beasties by not squeezing them into a slightly smaller box then I can't see that a non-standard form factor is going to worry the likes of Sony et-al and they may even see not letting the user swap in a commodity replacement when the original fails (or a capacity upgrade is needed) as an advantage...
It's standard enterprise drive size, like the VelociRaptor 300Gb (also 15mm), but instead of speed, it's built for capacity, you could use it to replace a tape backup solution (low power, high capacity, faster than tape), for the price, failed drives can be considered "consumable", at the moment we do disk to disk backups, and then backup the copy to tape (minimal downtime, or zero downtime minimal I/O impact), but the disk is expensive, this is "a" solution.
I suspect (as a previous poster said), this is obviously not designed for laptops, there are many other appliances such as PVRs (I have CCTV recorder and audio jukebox that this would fit in), and of course, you could fit it in a 3.5" bay with an adaptor, combined with it's low power and better airflow it would be much cooler too, I wonder if they would fit in iMacs?
Don't forget that WD are also building the ultra slim 7mm drives too, this isn't a killer product, it's a very specific one, just one for a complete range of products.
The failure rate for both is about the same in our server room (ditto sas) containing a few thousand drives.
The primary difference between enterprise sata and consumer sata is that enterprise drives are optimised for use in RAID arrays and are far more willing to declare a dodgy sector as "bad". Everything else is window dressing (improved reliability in vibration conditions experienced in a badly designed server drawer, 'finstance, etc)
That also means that enterprise sata drives should _never_ be used in a non-RAID configuration.
Quite frankly, given the cost premium for enterprise vs consumer drives I'm more likely to buy high-end consumer SSD as we've found they're at least as reliable as our rotating media with read access speeds and i/o rates which blow enterprise sas or sata out of the water plus there's no need to worry about vibration and cooling requirements decrease somewhat.
At some point SSD will eat Big Green Media's lunch, but at the moment they're busy eating Enterprise SATA's one and they've already taken over the sub-160Gb sector in our operation.
"It looks as if the 2TB Scorpio Blue has effectively become the 2TB Green drive."
If you open up a 2TB My Passport Studio you will find a Scorpio Blue with a model number WD20NPVT, the exact same model number as the "Green" pictured in the article. This shouldn't have been hard to work out as the 1TB My Passport Studio used a 12.7mm drive which also wouldn't fit in a normal laptop drive bay.
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