Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

A Few Features Under the Microscope

It is a shame that this Green Model doesn’t come with dual stage actuators as this would certainly help it in the latency department (the one area these drives really, really lag behind modern 7200rpm drives) as you will see later. Hopefully, at some point in the future this cutting edge technology will trickle down to the Green line but in the mean time there are many other technologies hidden inside this pretty faced drive. As we mentioned in the introduction, Western Digital didn’t stop at making it a 5400’ish rpm drive and call the power savings “good enough”. Rather, they did add in some other impressive tweaks to further reduce power consumption. Let’s take a moment and go over these improvements and other technologies the Caviar Green 2TB has.


NoTouch


As with all Western Digital drives this drive features “NoTouch” technology. This is a fancy way of saying your drive heads never touch the platters and during shutdown automatically park themselves. Except for a few of us old timers can anyone really remember having to manually tell their hard drive to park the heads? It was a big deal back in the day…but now every drive does this. As for never touching the heads, it's same deal; if your heads do hit the platter its called “cow belling” and your HDD dies while making a very distinctive cow bell-like sound.


IntelliSeek


Another feature which is basically par for the course now is IntelliSeek. What this features is and does is fairly simple to explain and yet it is still a very elegant solution to an age-old problem. On older drives the seek head would zip across the platter as soon as it could and then wait for the sector it needed on the platter to rotate around so it could read it, and then zip to the next one and wait. Rinse and repeat and you basically have an idea of how things used to work. What IntelliSeek does is calculate the best time to move the heads so that as soon as it reaches its destination, the sector is in position to be read. This keeps the arm in motion so that its electrical motor doesn’t have to overcome initial startup resistance which requires on average three times the amount of power (and certainly creates more noise). Western Digital states this reduces vibrations and power consumption and we believe them as it is simply a better way of doing things.


StableTrac


Next up is StableTrac, which is nice to see in a more value orientated product line like the Green. StableTrac means this HDD has it’s drive shaft anchored at both ends, and not just on one end like was the norm not too long ago. In this case this feature is used for reducing vibration and noise while increasing life expectancy. It really is nice to see this improvement trickle down to Western Digital's other drives as does make for both a more durable and silent running drive.


IntelliPark


The last feature we are going to look as is a double edged sword called IntelliPark. For the most part we have no issues with the assortment of power saving features Western Digital has built into their Green Line; however this feature is one we really wished Western Digital had included a way to over-ride (preferably via a jumper pin like they have for Spread Spectrum Clocking and PUIS; two other less than perfect "one size fits all" options). What this feature does is give the Green line the ability to park its head after a certain period of inactivity (usually about 8 seconds). On the surface this is a great idea as it will further reduce power consumption by reducing resistance drag on the spindle motor but many setups and operating systems do NOT like this and it can cause issues. One of the best examples of this is MS Home Server and Linux, both of which throw errors and fits when Greens are used.