ED#130 : Q & A With Western Digital (Page 4 Of 4)

19. For those who are stuck using older motherboards, will WD continue to offer any "larger than 2 TB" upgrade kits?

No. We are actually discontinuing the WD30EZRSDTL which comes with the separate HDA board.

Initially, we shipped the WD30EZRSDTL with the HDA (host bus adaptor) board because we thought the market was going to take a while to transition to UEFI-based motherboards. However, the motherboard manufacturers surprised us by quickly coming up with a workaround - to partition the HDD so that each partition does not exceed 2.1 TB.

Sure, it does not allow you to use the 2.5 TB or 3 TB hard disk drives as a single large partition, but it's more convenient than installing a separate HDA board. It also means less headache for us, as well as a lower cost, because we can now dump the HDA board. Hence, the WD30EZRSDTL will be discontinued and replaced by the WD30EZRX.

20. The 3 TB Caviar Green has been on the market for a while now. Will Western Digital ship a 3 TB Caviar Black soon?

No, not in the near future. We have the capability but the market is just not ready for a larger Caviar Black drive.

Most of those who buy the large capacity drives usually use them to store their digital media files - videos, photos, relying on a smaller capacity but faster hard disk drive to serve as boot drive. They don't need a large capacity high performance drive especially since most of the digital media files are accessed only occasionally.

It is all about the dollars and cents. If you have to choose between a 3 TB Caviar Green and a 2 TB Caviar Black at the same price, which would you buy? The market is quite clear about what they want. The most popular Caviar Black model right now is the 1 TB drive - we can't make enough to meet the demand. So it will be quite a while before the market is ready to accept a 3 TB Caviar Black.

21. In that case, what kinds of new HDD models can we expect WD to deliver in the near future?

You caught us at a bad time, so to speak. With the release of the 1 TB Scorpio Blue, Western Digital now has a stable line of products for the near future. As far as internal drives go, there's nothing new on the horizon, at least for the next 6 months. Of course, the branded products division is a different story - they always have something new coming up all the time.

22. How about Apple's Thunderbolt interface? Will WD be developing any external HDDs that support Thunderbolt?

No, for the foreseeable future, we will be sticking with USB 3.0. Besides, the hard disk drive becomes the bottleneck once we move to USB 3.0, so we have a lot of room left for improvement before we think of Thunderbolt.

That's It For Now!

That's all we have for you right now. We had a great time talking to Mr. Chang, and we certainly look forward to more interviews with him in the future.

Incidentally, we are waiting for some updates from Western Digital. When we get the information to share, we will update this article accordingly. So check back later for the updates!

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