Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

When we first looked at this drive the biggest thing which stood out is the fact it looks almost identical to the Western Digital 2TB Black we reviewed awhile back. Please don’t get us wrong, there is more than enough to distinguish the two from each other and unless you are literally colour blind and can’t read the Queen's English you will have a tough time mixing these two drives up. In a nutshell, you have the same black and silver coloured metal enclosure with black accents as the “Black” line but instead of a black striped label you have a green one.

We understand why Western Digital went with the same metal chassis for both their high-end drives as this does simplify the logistics of both lines which does help keep the manufacturing costs down. When all is said and done, the Green series is a more value orientated product and anything which can help keep the price down has to be considered a good thing.


As with the Black line, this product is a down right beefy product that has a good amount of heft to it. This weight is of course due to the fact that just like the Caviar Black 2TB, Western Digital has to use FOUR 500GB platters in this drive. Also in keeping with the previous 2TB we looked at, this drive is “only”2,000,000,000,000 bytes and not 2TiB (i.e. 2,199,023,255,552 bytes) so your OS will only show it as an approximately “1.81TB” drive.


According to the label, this power miser of a drive is rated to draw a maximum of 0.45 amps off the 12 volt line (5.4 watts) and 0.60 amps off the 5 volt line (3 watts), for a combined total of 8.4 watts. This is over a full watt LESS (1.05 watts to be precise) than the Caviar Black 2TB model we reviewed which sucked a combined total of 9.45 watts of power. This may not sound like much but considering the Black 2TB was already considered quite efficient, it is impressive to say the least.

On the surface a singe watt of savings doesn’t sound like much (though this IS 12.5% less power consumption over the high end product), but this does add up when you have a bunch of these drives running. In addition, the noise envelope of the Green series is substantially lower than the Blacks which could be a godsend if you have several HDDs in the same enclosure.