Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drive’s read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.

Read

As expected, the ultra dense platters make this a real beast in read speeds. Sure, it may not compare to the new Caviar Black 2TB or VelociRaptor…BUT those drives cost a heck of a lot more too. From about the midpoint of the ATTO tests this GREEN drive is actually faster than a Caviar Black 640GB and only slightly slower than the 1TB Caviar Black (about 3MB/s on average). As we have said before, dense platters can only get you so far and the dual actuator, dual controller 7200RPM Caviar Black 2TB eats this drive for breakfast with about a 40MB/s difference in speed. On the plus side, at the low end of the ATT test suite all the hard drives (and most of the Solid State Drives too) had very similar postings with all of them being in the same “ballpark” so to speak. All in all, we are really coming to be impressed by the read performance of this iteration of the Green series, something which we were not really expecting.

Write

Once again, we see that the write speeds of this drive were again very close to the 1TB Caviar Black with only a 3 - 4MB/s separation. While this was somewhat expected, what was VERY interesting was that the Caviar Green 2TB’s performance curve is very, very similar to the 640GB version of the Caviar Black.