Lake Forest, Illinois - Western Digital is the first out of the gate in the race to produce a hard drive offering two terabytes (TB) of storage.

The WD20EADS, a 3.5-inch drive with 32 megabytes (MB) of cache, is part of the WD Caviar Green series and will be available in stores for around 300 dollars, the company reports. Four storage disks with a capacity of 500 gigabytes (GB) each are housed inside the casing.

The manufacturer promises an average energy savings of four to five watts compared to non-Green series drives. The savings are achieved through variable spin speeds and intelligent interim data storage.

Western Digital also announced the WD15EADS, a WD Caviar Green drive with 1.5 TB of storage space. No price has been announced as yet. (dpa)