Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB HDD

Western Digital has improved its low power consuming line

of HDDs, titled the Caviar Green, by increasing the cache size to 64 MB from its

earlier 32 MB spec. The disk still operates through a SATA 3Gbps interface.

Since the drive consumes lesser power for its operation, it is suitable for

personal attached storage in offices and homes and may be ideal for use in low

power PCs as well. We checked out the drive performance using the HDTune

benchmark. We observed a marginal increase in the average transfer speeds of the

drive as compared with its earlier counterpart. The earlier version displayed

transfer speeds of about 72 MB/sec whereas this version delivered 80 MB/sec with

an access time of 14.7 ns. The disk operates in the sub 7200 RPM range, which

contributes to the loss in performance. The burst rates achieved by the disk are

in the region of 180 MB/sec which is a major high point in terms of performance.

These scores still appear meager when compared with 91.4 MB/sec with an access

time of 12.3 ns achieved by Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB, another low power

consuming disk, reviewed in October 2009. Barracuda consumes 6.8W during

read/write operations whereas this one consumes just 5.4W, thus making it meaner

on energy consumption but still low on performance as compared to the Barracuda

drive.

Bottomline: The drive is definitely good on the

green side but needs to up the ante further  in terms of performance.