Hardware Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green

I think this is still a good solution of you're running a file server for home or small business. The drive speed wouldn't matter, since the network is the bottleneck, but you can use a small NAS box with LOTs of storage. This drive has its niche market, but I wouldn't put it inside my main PC.

 

Yeah, I fail to see how HDD's can be labeled green anyway, when SSD's seem to require less power than the 'greenest' of 'green' drives. It's about like that stirling-engine powered southbridge cooler from a while back: neat engineering, but questionable power savings overall in your PC by deleting one .5 W fan

 

But they refer to real qualities. The WD GreenPower drives are the lowest power consuming 3.5" mechanical drives on the market. Of course SSD's are more economical still, but then again a horse and cart is also greener than a "green" Smart Car. It's all about context.

By that argument we should compare Intel Atom processors high-end quad-core i7's. Although that does give you a frame of reference for their performance, it tells you nothing about how they would perform in their actual application domain, as would a comparison with, say, a VIA Nano.

 

I have to disagree. Green drives use a little less energy JUST to be true enough to claim a green label. I was not saying it's a scam or "some" few people could not benefit from having one or many together in a Raid. I see no reason for a dedicated comparison review when it comes to a small difference of energy green to high performance drives.

I think the point of the review is; Hey you want to go "green" this is how much slower it is and the energy it uses. Do you see the benefit?

CPU's?? You can not use the example of Intel Atom and a i7 comparison to a green or high performance drive comparison. Thats a whole different spectrum. CPU's define what the PC will be used for, they set the foundation of what you can expect from the setup. Drives on the other hand even though they do change the performance will not have "That Vast" of a difference.

I think it is important to compare high performance with green drives. So you can see if it's worth it. And as for a regular computer "like most people have" I say they are not worth it for me.
I Know green drives will not noticeably save you money in your home. And will not put a dent in the energy consumption issues we have in the world. Turn out the lights when you leave the room.

My life and business is about these issues, we are a green family. My business is to construct Plasma gas Plants that eliminate land fields and turn the waste into energy. My Regal family sale and build solar projects for home and businesses around the world. (I take serious notice of green products) Here is some local news on what we do excuse the use of "Wiki" its outdated but it explains the basics of the plants well;

http://www.amarillo.com/stories/111206/bus_5907541.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_gasification

 

Good Review, even if it all added, up what server with 100 HDD farms would buy a green 2TB drive? Wouldn't they just get thousands of SSDs? Or the Caviar Blues? Which are much better.

 

Sorry I jumped off my first comment too fast. I skimmed through the review and didn't find the section i wanted. And started bashing ><
Having reread the whole review, i thought it was very decent. It shows how Green HDD is much slower then other HDD.

However i still think there should be a small section on power saving, noise and heat it generate. But this was also absent on the Samsung review i will say this as a suggestion rather then critics.

 

I'd say the WD Green 2TB drive's closest competitor is the Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB, which is listed at a far lower price point, yet seemingly beats it in every benchmark.

I concur that it's a bit unfair to pit the WD Green against performance drives. If anything the article should have drawn more comparisons with said Seagate drive.

By the way, is the Seagate 1.5TB a safe buy these days? There was talk about a firmware update, but I haven't really kept up with the news on that end.

 

One thing i'd liked to have seen in this review is how this drive compares to the other WD Green drives, and the other 5400rpm drives.

These Drives are perfect for storage applications, being much quieter then the Samsung F1 and other 7200rpm drives and also generating less vibration and heat. You could hard mount one of the green drives in a cramped obscure area of the case without worrying about it overheating or making noticable amounts of noise through resonance.

I don't see why people would want a 1tb drive as an OS drive, surely you don't need more than 640gb for that.. and it's not such a great idea to use one as an OS and a Storage drive, even if you use partitions.. Because you'd end up trying to do multiple things on the same drive at the same time, and cripple the performance relative to a two drive setup using a fast OS drive and a seperate storage drive.

If you do use a seperate OS drive and storage drive, the storage drive only really needs to be able to read at least as fast as the main drive can write, and fast enought to stream any media you want to play.. I'm sure even the slowest green drive would be faster at installing something onto the main drive then a 1tb drive would be when installing something from a storage partition to the OS partition.

 

I also don't think the price of this new 2tb drive is all that bad considering it's the first and only one on the market atm.. I know people who paid over $800 AUD for the hitachi 1tb drive months after it was available here in aus, and this 2tb drive can be had for less than $550 around here right now. It's not like Seagate's 1.5tb drive wouldn't be this expensive if it was the biggest one atm and din't have anything wrong with it. That was almost $500 AUD when it was released here before iirc.

 

Choice of competition was an interesting one.

I wonder how many people who're considering a 2TB drive (presumably for media storage) are also considering any of those SSD drives it was compared to? I mean, I wouldn't have thought that a 32GB SSD and a 2TB platter drive were aimed at the same market? Be nice to see the same figures with the erroneous choices omitted.

 

I'll get some numbers for the 1TB Green in time for the next HDD review.

And I use a Samsung 1TB as my boot disk, not so much for the capacity (although it's certainly nice), but more for the awesome performance.

 

The difference is that the HDDs are designed with different priorities in mind. Vans and sports cars, remember?

Except that the review did not look at the energy it uses, or its temperatures. All it says is: "It's slow".

Obviously they do --because they are designed for different purposes. There is a reason why people will go for expensive, smaller capacity, noisy, hot Raptors --they're very fast. There's a reason why people will pay a vast premium for real small capacity SSD drives --they're robust, fast and use little power. Other people may decide to pay a premium for capacity, low noise and low power/temperature. Who is to say that their criteria are less valid?

FOR YOU perhaps not. But not everybody considers performance the most important criterion.

 

Greetings!

Its not that slow.
Check the Xbit-Labs review:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/1tb-14hdd-roundup.html

 

Man all these people arguing.

My point, why would you buy a drive that saves a little bit of power if it's just going to use this "saved power" by being active longer. In a car analagy it could be like this, driving slower means you use less gas per hour, but what if driving slower uses more MPG but less GPH? I would prefer overall efficiency.

If I were wanting something that was efficient I would prefer something that uses twice the power and gets the job done in a quarter of the time, not something that uses less power but takes longer to do it's job.

 

these drives are 300 on newegg, so why dont people just buy 3-1TB for the same price.