Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.


We already knew that small read and writes were not exactly this drive’s strong suit so it does not come as any shock to see this drive at the bottom of the charts. With that being said, it’s not what you would call slow for a 5400rpm(ish) drive either. We are almost certain that if this chart included some other 5400 drives that the Caviar Green wouldn’t be at the bottom any more. Also as we have said before, the Green series is not designed to house an operating system so this test is not exactly playing to it’s strong points. However, with numbers like this it is still a viable option for situations where you are willing to give up a speed for noise. For example this would make a pretty darn good HTPC drive with numbers like this as it would be extremely quiet yet still be relatively quick.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!


Once again we see that the low spindle speed and high latency plays merry hob with this drive’s performance numbers. When you get past the large differences you can than actually see that it isn’t all bad news. Most people are not going to be buying a Caviar Green for their speed, but this drive is surprisingly fast and we thought the difference would be much, much greater.