Western Digital’s Caviar Green

WD's Caviar Green is the first hard drive to offer 2 TB of capacity. The Caviar Green line of Hard drive's offer reduced power consumption by up to 40 percent compared to standard desktop drives with the combination of WD's IntelliSeek, NoTouch, and IntelliPower technologies. Caviar Green drives yield an average drive power savings of 4-5 watts over standard desktop drives making it possible to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation.

Specifications

All Western Digital desktop drives are based on SATA/300 interfaces with NCQ and have 32 MB cache. The operating temperature range was increased from between five degrees Celsius and 55 degrees Celsius to between zero degrees Celsius and 60 degrees Celsius.

Western Digital doesn’t talk about its actual spindle speeds and prefers to refer to IntelliPower, which is the marketing name for the balance between spindle speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms, as part of its effort to design drives with the best balance between performance and power consumption.

Performance



The 2TB WD hard drive is not one of the most efficient drives, as it is based on four platters. Therefore, its operating temperature reached 39.0 degrees Celsius (102.2 degrees Fahrenheit) after a long idle period, which is higher than the temperatures we observed with the other drives. The throughput maxed out at 102 MB/s. Access time, however, was surprisingly quick at only 13.2 ms. The Western Digital’s Caviar Green has great access time and I/O performance despite being a low-power drive.