Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or Crystal DiskMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containing 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.


As expected, the small file transfer numbers are not exactly impressive. We knew they were not going to be as this drive is only a single controller drive, with higher than normal latency in amongst low latency, high speed, high performance drives.

The copy “to itself from itself” test only further reinforces what we have been saying all along: this drive does have high latency and in some circumstance this will severely hobble performance BUT the severity is relative. Heck, the Green 2TB would easily eat an older 1TB Green for breakfast and it is a shame that we don’t have any in our charts for comparison purposes.