Introduction

Ten percent of all 3.5in hard drives sold today are in capacities of 1TB or greater, claims Mark Geenen, President of Trend Focus. For enthusiasts, that number would grow exponentially and with their low cost, rightly so. A few months ago Seagate launched their 1.5TB drive, but it has been plagued with firmware issues that are only now getting resolved. Just as with the graphics card world, hard drive manufacturers play the performance and capacity leapfrog game.

In this round Western Digital was first to reach the finish line and the race was to 2 terabytes of storage capacity. This is achieved through their new platter technology that allows for 500 GB of data to be stored on a single platter. Western Digital also filled the drive with their best IP like IntelliSeek and IntelliPower technology that allows the new 2TB Caviar to fall under the Green product line. The advanced technology doesn't stop there, but we will get into all of the details on the Specifications Page.

Seagate shocked us with their 1.5TB drive costing less than 150 USD at launch and Western Digital countered with a 299 MSRP; this too was shocking. Hopefully in the future we will be able to get a pair of each drive to test some RAID 1 or an entire array for advanced RAID 5 and 6 testing, but for now we will settle for a straight fight between the two drives based on single drive performance. Let's dive right in and check out the feature set!