Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB hard drive

Very, very quiet - and very, very capacious

The test system consists of an Intel DX38BT motherboard with a Core 2 Q9300 processor, 2GB of Kingston 1333MHz DDR 3 memory, a passively cooled AMD Radeon HD 3450 graphics card and the Intel SSD, so the rig is very quiet indeed. We ran 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate with HD Tach 3 and the hard drive element of PCMark05, and also timed the transfer of a 2GB folder of files from one drive to another.

Eco friendly?

The 1TB Black delivers similar performance to the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11, although it loses out to the Seagate by a narrow margin all along the way. It would be unfair to call the Caviar Black noisy, but the 33dBA noise rating under load makes it clearly audible and prone to causing vibration inside your PC. By contrast, the 2TB Green is very quiet indeed and is effectively silent.

Our synthetic benchmark tests show that the 2TB Green is marginally slower than the 1TB Black in average read and write tests, but the burst speed and random access times of the Green put it ahead of the Black. Transferring files within the drive took longer with the 2TB Green than it did with either the 1TB Black or 1.5TB Seagate, which is exactly what we'd expect to see considering the Green's slower rotational speed.

The surprise came when we hooked up each drive to the Intel SSD and found that the 2TB Green was marginally faster than the 1TB Black. WD claims that its IntelliSeek technology "calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration", and this may well be evidence of the technology in action. Alternatively, it could simply be the result of the increased areal density that delivers 500GB per platter.

All we know is that we can hardly wait for a 2TB Caviar Black with 7200rpm spindle speed.

Verdict

WD’s new 2TB Caviar Green is surprisingly fast yet it's also very quiet. Besides, what self-respecting power PC owner doesn't want a 2TB drive? ®

More Storage Reviews...

Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda

WD VelociRaptor 300GB

Intel X-25M

1TB HDD Group Test