Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read

If we were impressed with the HD Tach read results, we are almost astounded by the Crystal DiskMark read numbers. Yes, in the all critical small 4k reads this drive is over 32% slower than a 1TB Black (its nearest competitor), but the Green is built not as an OS drive (where small 4k read and writes matter the most) but as a data drive where medium size and sequential performance count the most. It is here that the Caviar Green is only about 5MB/s and 1.4MB/s slower than a Caviar Black. This works out to be a moderate difference of 8.6% for the 512KB test and a mere 1.2% for sequential read speed. Dang, this drive is FAST for a Caviar Green.

Write

As expected, the performance numbers this drive posts in the CDM write tests are not as glowing as they were with the read speeds. We do have to wonder how much better this drive would have been if Western Digital had included a dual actuator and dual processor. I am sure that the difference in power consumption would have been minor and I for one would be willing to put up with a moderate increase in electricity if it meant more performance with the same kick ass low noise envelope the Greens are famous for.

Random Access Time

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use “h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test” for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamut of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used “h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest”. This tells the program to write all results in english, save them in drivetest.txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).



There is no getting around the fact that the random access speed this drive has (and we use the word “speed” more than a little bit ironically here) is poor. This makes perfect sense to us and as anyone who has lowered the AAM of their 7200rpm drive to quiet it down knows: low latency and low noise do NOT go together. If this is the only major concession Western Digital had to make we will be more than happy with this Caviar Green drive.