Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

Conclusion

The Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB is one of those products that comes along every now and then which we don't have high expectations for but we nonetheless walked away extremely impressed. This drive is certainly not an enthusiast “high performance” grade product, but it was not designed to be a competitor to the Caviar Black. Rather, the Green line of drives was designed to be a low noise, low heat drive which could still deliver solid performance and in every one of those categories it excels.

Unfortunately, the engineers over at Western Digital are not miracle workers and to get lowered noise and lower power consumption some concessions had to be made. As the old saying goes: “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” and in this particular case low noise and low power consumption does come at the cost of decreased read and write performance when compared to the 2TB Black but mainly it comes at the cost of increased latency. Random latency is what can make or break an “Operating System” drive as it is a contributing factor to how fast a system “feels” and with this drive, you will not get the same lightning-quick response as with enthusiast-oriented products. Does this mean the Green 2TB will not make a decent OS drive? Basically, you will never see a Green in a bleeding edge PC which is designed and built for maximum speed, but that is what Solid State Drives, the VelociRaptor and Black models from Western Digital are for. Where you WILL see these drives is in Home Theatre PC’s, external storage solutions and anywhere else that favours low power consumption or low noise output over shear performance. In these places only a SSD can compete (but not on cost per GB) and most other hard disk drives are left eating the Caviar Green’s dust in those key areas.

Our hats are off to those wizards of engineering over at Western Digital, as they were given an extremely difficult task: to build a drive which is seemingly made of contradictions (size, speed and power yet low noise and efficient) and that is exactly what they did. They went about balancing everything out and ended up with a drive which performs amazingly well at what is built to do and that is deliver top class storage performance while offering something for everyone.

When you add up all of the Green's positive traits and subtract its less than optimal traits what you are left with can best be summed up very quickly: this is a Dam Good Value for its target market. If you are looking for a down right massive hard drive for data storage or use in an external enclosure, a HTPC or myriad of other situations where the Caviar Black or VelociRaptor would not be a great fit, the Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB should be on your short list. There simply are no other options out there which can match the size and performance with such a low noise and energy consumption profile like this drive can. With all that being said, this version of the Green line does actually come with a price premium over its smaller 1.5TB brother which is something to take into account if you are willing to pay less money for a drive that has less capacity.



Pros:
- Low energy consumption
- HUGE 2TB size
- Great Price for a drive this size
- Low Noise
- Best Price per GB ratio we have ever seen in a review unit


Cons:
- While not expensive, the biggest drive going always command a price premium
- Low noise and power come at the expense of increased latency
- Slow compared to 2TB Black
- Single processor
- Single Actuator design
- While WD claims they are set anywhere from 5400rpm to 7200rpm, this drive is most likely in the 5400 to 5600rpm range