Page 3: Testing, Conclusion
Testing
The drive has 1.82 TB of usable space since hard drive manufacturers adopted the wrong scale of computer units. Regardless, 1.8TB of usable space is pretty amazing. It wasn't too long ago that people were trying to figure out how to fill up a 500MB drive and now even the largest drives are easily usable. The ability to not worry about usable scratch space is the key on these drives. You could also pop a couple in a backup server to really have a good amount of storage. The drive also performed close to the rated power requirements as well. It was 4 Watts idling and about 7 Watts under load.
In the graph below, the WD20EADS was pitted against a much older Seagate 320GB drive to show what a new drive can do. The Seagate model was a 7200.10 and is a more performance oriented drive than the Green 2TB drive.
In most of the tests, the Western Digital drive comes out faster than the older Seagate model. If this was pitted against a newer drive, the results would probably tip the other way. That being said, this drive is more about raw size than pure speed and you do get a great amount of space for storage.
Conclusion
While this drive marked the new 2TB limit for hard drives, it is really useful if you have a backup solution to go along with this space. The majority of uses for this 2TB drive would probably be in the server oriented role (a storage server). The amount of data this drive can backup is staggering. It is really obvious why hard drives are replacing tape backup. Commodity prices of these drives make them beneficial over tape and the tape library. Though, if someone is using this as a personal drive without a backup, 1.82TB is quite a bit of information to lose.
The other issue at the time of writing is the price on the drive. The drive is retailing for »about $300. A faster 1TB hard drive will set you back »about $100 which begs the question. If you can buy three 1TB drives for the price of a single 2TB, would you? Throw them in a RAID 5 array and you're safe and relatively speedy.
That being said, this drive targets more than just the consumer market. The higher density that this drive provides allows servers with far greater capacities than before with even the 1.5TB drives. The Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB drive is certainly paving the way to our higher storage needs. If you need the high density storage that a single 2TB drive provides, the WD Caviar Green is a great choice.
ASE Labs would like to thank Western Digital for making this review possible.
The drive has 1.82 TB of usable space since hard drive manufacturers adopted the wrong scale of computer units. Regardless, 1.8TB of usable space is pretty amazing. It wasn't too long ago that people were trying to figure out how to fill up a 500MB drive and now even the largest drives are easily usable. The ability to not worry about usable scratch space is the key on these drives. You could also pop a couple in a backup server to really have a good amount of storage. The drive also performed close to the rated power requirements as well. It was 4 Watts idling and about 7 Watts under load.
In the graph below, the WD20EADS was pitted against a much older Seagate 320GB drive to show what a new drive can do. The Seagate model was a 7200.10 and is a more performance oriented drive than the Green 2TB drive.
Elapsed Time Results (Lower is better)
- Name
- Value
ImageMagick Compilation
- WD20EADS
- 53.36
- SG320
- 51.99
Apache Compilation
- WD20EADS
- 29.82
- SG320
- 30.20
Parallel BZIP2 Compression
- WD20EADS
- 102.79
- SG320
- 110.80
LZMA Compression
- WD20EADS
- 149.79
- SG320
- 152.52
Flexible IO Tester
- WD20EADS
- 105.84
- SG320
- 111.36
In most of the tests, the Western Digital drive comes out faster than the older Seagate model. If this was pitted against a newer drive, the results would probably tip the other way. That being said, this drive is more about raw size than pure speed and you do get a great amount of space for storage.
Conclusion
While this drive marked the new 2TB limit for hard drives, it is really useful if you have a backup solution to go along with this space. The majority of uses for this 2TB drive would probably be in the server oriented role (a storage server). The amount of data this drive can backup is staggering. It is really obvious why hard drives are replacing tape backup. Commodity prices of these drives make them beneficial over tape and the tape library. Though, if someone is using this as a personal drive without a backup, 1.82TB is quite a bit of information to lose.
The other issue at the time of writing is the price on the drive. The drive is retailing for »about $300. A faster 1TB hard drive will set you back »about $100 which begs the question. If you can buy three 1TB drives for the price of a single 2TB, would you? Throw them in a RAID 5 array and you're safe and relatively speedy.
That being said, this drive targets more than just the consumer market. The higher density that this drive provides allows servers with far greater capacities than before with even the 1.5TB drives. The Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB drive is certainly paving the way to our higher storage needs. If you need the high density storage that a single 2TB drive provides, the WD Caviar Green is a great choice.
ASE Labs would like to thank Western Digital for making this review possible.