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The Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB drive looks like any other hard drive on the outside, but there’s something deeper inside – microchips and software that monitor the efficiency and power of the drive. The Green series of drives have the ability to dynamically optimize how fast they spin, depending on the system load. This means the drive doesn’t quite feel as fast as a 7200 RPM drive, but still feels faster than a 5400 RPM drive.
A Note On RAID’s:
Before you get the bright idea of slapping a few of these drives together into a massive RAID array, you should be aware of a few hardware and software limitations. Many older raid cards can’t handle volume sizes greater than 2TB without an update to the firmware. Some may not even support it at all. To top it all off, versions of windows prior to Vista (excluding some of the windows server variants) don’t support partitions larger than 2TB in size. This has to do with the inherit addressing limitations of the MBR (Master Boot Record) partitioning scheme that XP and prior versions use. Vista can circumvent this by using what is called a GPT (GUID Partition Table) instead of a MBR. Luckily after this drive is formatted it comes out to be about 1.8TB in size, which will partition just fine under XP. The problem exists when you try to use two or more of the drives in a RAID array.
If you want to use this drive in a raid array and want a partition greater than 2TB, you need to be using at least Vista and a newer (or compatible) RAID controller.
Test Rig:
- NZXT Whisper Case
- Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R Motherboard
- Intel Core i7-920
- 6GB Crucial Ballistx Tracer RAM
- Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Drive
- Palit Radeon 4870 Sonic Dual Edition
- PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Watt PSU
- Windows Vista x64
Datamarck:
Datamarck is a program we like to use to test the read rate, as well as the seek time of the drive. It also gives useful information such as the number of sectors and capacity.
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| Datamarck Info | Datamarck Test Run |
As we can see, the drive scored an average of 67.2 MB/s for the read transfer speed (higher is better) and a 32.4 ms seek time (lower is better).
I bought the 1.5TB version and put it in an external enclosure, hooked up to my laptop through usb. It’s very nice for storage, but playing FLAC off of it is very irritating: VLC will load part of the file, and then the drive goes back to sleep… 8 seconds later VLC wants the next part and the music will pause for a splitsecond while the drive powers up again, it will do this 2 or 3 times before finally working properly the rest of the song…
The IntelliPower feature means that, depending on how the HD is used, it can speed up from it’s default speed of 5400 to 7200 rpm, so do NOT expect this to be fast; instead, use this drive primarily for storage!
Unfortunately, WD does NOT state this @ their webiste which is VERY MISLEADING!
People are buying SLOW drives at the cost of “environment friendliness” (i.e.low energy consumption device)!
I have bought this peace of crap few months ago! And I really hate it, because when it gets to the point of 1/2 capacity it’s stops working! I can’t download anything after it reaches 1TB level, so basically it’s not a 2TB hard drive, it only gives you 1TB capacity! It was just a waste of my time and money! Don’t buy this crap!
Ah I didn’t see the last page stating the price, sorry. That’s really not that bad considering I paid around $80 for 500gb early this year. Which now I could probably pay upwards of $90 for 1tb now lol. I like the whole “green” idea of hard drives now.
Thanks for posting, I enjoyed reading this Review. I think you should post more frequently, you obviously have natural ability for reviewing Hardware. Maybe you could Review mine sometime…
Vista this, XP that.
ZFS!
This drive looks cool, but who really needs a 2TB Drive. for their own computer?
I have a 500 GB and that does more than fine for my music, back up, and some TV shows that i downloaded.
This drive works really well in NAS systems and Home Theater PCs where you want the machine to be low power and have a small profile ideally. Like I said in the conclusion, it also works very well for datacenters where they need as much storage density as possible so they can save floor space.
Actually I passed the 1tb years ago and now even 3tb of storage is a bit constraining. You might not need more than 500g, however add in the whole family with kids and soon with those games (gigabytes just to install games not to mention saved games, whole music selections in flac, copies of dvd for streaming, family pictures, etc.) And that 3tb is just my computer, add in the kids and for my household it’s over 6tb of storage.
I completely agree…I have a 1TB Drive that I use as a back up drive, and its full…all the time. I sometimes find myself deleting stuff just so I can fit newer stuff in. I wish i had one of these…lol…
Sounds nice buts what’s the price on this beast?
The Drive can be found on Newegg for that price HERE with free shipping.
All in all, its a bit on the expensive side, but for size and performance, you really cant beat it.