Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

[AkG]

XP Start Up / Adobe Photoshop Load Time

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.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/WD2TBGreen/boot.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
​

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!

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/WD2TBGreen/adobe.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
​

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.

 

[AkG]

Real World Data Transfers

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.

 

[AkG]

Value

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of their initial review for the "Original" chart and are the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of this review for the "Updated" chart.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/WD2TBGreen/value.jpg" border="0" alt="" />

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/WD2TBGreen/value_up.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
​

When it comes down to brass tacks this drive is a down right GREAT VALUE. Low noise, low power consumption, decent performance all at a frugal price point, what’s NOT to love?

 

[AkG]

Conclusion

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

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...een-2tb-hard-drive-review-comment-thread.html​