WD today announced the launch of its 2.5 TB and 3 TB AV-GP SATA hard drives, targeted towards AV professionals and hobbyists alike, and set to ship immediately. The 3.5-inch hard drives offer low power consumption and more storage than you’ll find on any other hard drive, which could come in handy for you AV geeks who use hard drives for storage-intensive purposes like the use of video recorders, video surveillance, single-drive media servers, and external multimedia storage.
As of now, these SATA hard drives from WD are actually too big for most computers, as drives larger than 2.19 TB are not supported by systems running Windows XP. Computers running 32-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7, on the other hand, categorize drives larger than 2.19 TB as secondary drives. Therefore, it’s pretty important that you engage in a little due diligence and check out WD’s whitepaper before making any purchases, just to confirm that the WD AV-GP drives will work with your system.
Just to add a little perspective, the 3 TB model can hold up to approximately 600,000 photos, 230 hours of video, and 750,000 songs, according to WD’s specs page. The 2.5 and 3TB WD drives are available now for $159.99 and $179.99 respectively, and come with a three-year limited warranty.