[Beowulf] Not sure if people have seen it yet, but 2TB disks from Western Digital appear to be in the wild ...

[Michael Brown]

Bruno Coutinho wrote:
[...]
>> Interesting thing is that this presumably 5400rpm drives outperforms
>> its 7200rpm counterparts. And it's green too. :)
>
> It isn't a 5400rpm driver, it is multispeed with speed between 5400 and
> 7200rpm.

Actually, it almost certainly is 5400 RPM. WD's website originally implied 
that the speed was variable, and this was picked up by various review sites. 
They (WD) got dinged for it when a couple of sites showed that the speed did 
not in fact change, and was fixed at 5400 RPM. Since then, they've removed 
nearly all details of the actual speed from their site. However, it is still 
mentioned in one place:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/greenpower/technology.asp?language=en
Where it says "For each drive model, WD may use a different, invariable 
RPM."

However, no-one has ever found a greenpower drive that operated at anything 
but ~5400 RPM, so it's probably safe to assume this one does too. From the 
hothardware test, it shows about 110 MB/sec on the outer tracks, which is 
about 37% faster than the 1 GB (5400 RPM) greenpower. They've doubled the 
areal density of the platters, so a 37% linear density improvement would be 
about right, suggesting that the spindle speed hasn't changed.


Cheers,
Michael