Way back in 2008, we reported that Seagate was lowering warranties of its hard disk drives from 5 years to 3. This trend quickly spread throughout the HDD industry and unsurprisingly, wasn't something that customers were too happy about. Now, Western Digital is lowering the warranty on some of its HDD lines from 3 years to a mere 2, with the affected lines being the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue. Lines not affected are the Caviar Black, Scorpio Black, A/V drives and externals. Also, as the stock feeds through the channel, there will be a transition period where the same model in a store will have either a 2 or 3 year warranty, depending on its serial number, which can be checked on WD's support site. It will be interesting to see if retailers will clearly differentiate to customers which drives have which warranty, as it might be rather convenient for them not to.

Channel partners have received a letter from SelectWD about this:

WD today announced that it is now shipping desktop 7200 RPM 2 TB hard drives and is qualifying with OEMs enterprise-class hard drives based on WD's 500 gigabytes-per-platter technology. The popular family of WD Caviar Black drives, now led by the new 2 TB capacity, is perfect for gaming, high-performance desktop systems and workstations; while the WD RE4 2 TB is suited for servers, network attached storage and storage networks.

High-performance hard drives by an industry leader in performance, WD Caviar Black and WD RE4 2 TB drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 64 MB cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 3 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor to deliver ultimate performance in a maximum-capacity drive.

Western Digital is adding another high-capacity hard drive to its ranks. This time, the company it looking to expand its Caviar Black series of performance desktop hard drives, with the RE4-GP (WD2002FYPS). This 2 Terabyte drive boasts of a large 64 MB of cache, and two controllers on board to up the performance. It spins at 7200 rpm, and uses the standard SATA II interface. With four platters inside it, the drive weighs in at 0.73 kg. Ahead of its global launch, the drive seems to have already made it to stores in Japan, where unit packs of the drive are decking up shelves. When released in the west, these drives could go for around US $300 a piece.

WD today launched its new line of WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM 3.5-inch SATA (Serial ATA) hard drives for high-performance desktop, workstation and multi-drive systems. Available in capacities of 750GB and 1TB, WD Caviar Black hard drives are part of a new family of WD product categories designed to simplify the buying experience for customers worldwide.