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Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA HDD
A Closer Look:
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The Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB drive looks like any other hard drive from the surface, but there's something deeper inside - microchips and software that monitor the efficiency and power of the drive. In order to get a really good closer look here, we would need a screwdriver and a room with no dust to take this bad boy apart. Our best bet is going to be relying on benchmarks and temperatures for this drive.
Benchmarking:
Test Rig:
- Thermaltake Kandalf LCS case
- ASUS Striker II NSE motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650
- Corsair XMS3 DHX 4GB DDR3 kit
- Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB Drive
- PowerColor HD 4870
- Tagan BZ900 900W PSU
- Windows Vista 32-bit
DataMarck:
Datamarck tests the read rate, as well as the seek time of the drive. We can see here that the Western Digital drive has 63 sectors, a total 931.5GB capacity, 121,601 cylinders, and a Fibre interface. The info tab on Datamarck is very useful in finding out statistics you may not find online. Moving on the test, we see that our read rate has a maximum of 60.9MB/sec and a minimum of 33.3MB/sec, giving us an average read rate of 50.1MB/sec (higher numbers are better). Again, we stress here that this drive is meant for low power, and will not fare huge on performance. The main focus of this drive is for external enclosures you never want to turn off.
Moving on to the seek time, we see that the maximum is 124.7ms and the minimum is 102.1ms, giving us an average seek time of 110.0ms (lower numbers are better).
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Datamarck Info |
Datamarck Test run |
On the Datamarck website, we can compare our data with the data of other hard drives on the market. This is a small clip from the data set showing how the Caviar Green 1TB drive stacks up to other drives.
| # | Vendor | Model | Capacity | Type | Interface | marks | read speed | seek time |
| 127. | Seagate | Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640AS |
750 GB | HD 3.5" | SCSI | 1 | 53 MB/s | 18.2 ms |
| 128. | Western Digital | WD10EVCS | 1000 GB | ATA | 1 | 52 MB/s | 24.6 ms | |
| 129. | NVIDIA | STRIPE 698.65G | 750 GB | RAID | SCSI | 5 | 52 MB/s | 0.5 ms |
| 130. | Western Digital | WD10EADS | 1000 GB | Fibre | 1 | 50 MB/s | 109.5 ms | |
| 131. | Promise | 4+0 Stripe/RAID0 | 640 GB | SCSI | 1 | 50 MB/s | 11.2 ms | |
| 132. | EQLOGIC | 100E-00 | 537 GB | iSCSI | 1 | 49 MB/s | 1.5 ms |
You can see that our Caviar Green Drive is the only Fibre drive on that list. The seek time bothered me a bit. Most of the other drives in the list didn't exceed 20ms, and our drive ran 5x that time.
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