Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based drives. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.



With just an average of 87.2MB/s the Green 2TB is one of the slowest drives we have tested. However, this is only half the story as the Caviar Green is also the only 5400rpm...ish drive we have looked at. The fact that there is under 10MB/s difference between the Green and the 1TB Black is actually impressive when you think about it. Remember, the Green drive line are designed for low noise and power efficiency first and performance second and that it can come this close to a Caviar Black IS impressive in our books.

The reason this drive does great in this test is because it has down right amazing platter densities and we firmly believe its low spindle speed and single core controller are the limiting factors. Of course, if it was a dual core, 7200rpm drive it wouldn’t be as efficient and its entire "raison d’etre" would be extinguished.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.


Once again on the surface of things the write speeds of this drive may not seem all that impressive; but looks can be deceiving. As we said earlier: this chart is full of past and current high performance products and only high performance hard drives. If you look closely you can see that the Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB is almost as fast as the last generation (1TB version) Black. Let me say that again: a GREEN drive is almost as fast in write speeds as a BLACK. Impressive.