Conclusions

The Caviar® Green™  has most certainly lived up to its claims and Western Digital must be extremely pleased that a hard disc as versatile as this has produced such good results.   It most certainly caught us on the hop here with its raw performance and a huge leap forward from last years 1TB outing.   This in turn means that many end users from all walks of life can utilise this disc in just about any scenario that springs to mind.  Video File on demand servers and Video Surveillance end users will be jumping around at the endless possibilities that this 2TB drive will bring - on mass storage space savings for one.

What of the Tier Ones, S.I.’s and OEM’s alike, well, for those trying to move forward the ultimate system this has to be currently the slave hard disc of choice for the performance systems.   For the ones who feel the need for bigger is better; then what the heck as the 2TB Caviar® Green™  does it exceedingly well.  

Mass storage within cases of this magnitude need good cooling and easy access to slam dunk in a drive whenever the need arises.  The Akasa Infiniti Zor fits the bill very readily here with its 7 drive bay tool-less 3 1/2" drive bays.  It takes seconds to get a drive into place or removed if the need arises.   As a point of note there is no shortage either on the cooling front and bang for buck it gives many a chassis out there a run for its monies.

Management of the file system on a drive of this magnitude will require good house-keeping especially when we reach a status of approx 500GB.  Easily done in today's environments.  Therefore disc defragmentation tools spring to mind.  The more we throw on the drive the messier it gets and in turn means slower response times in read/write.  There are many out there though our choice remains within Diskeeper and its latest variant 2009.  This brings to the fore its Terabyte Volume Engine (TVE) (more information can be found here) which will keep this massive hard disc from getting into a bit of a muddle.

Notwithstanding, when new hard discs of this magnitude appear on the scene, the first thing we normally encounter is the need for a bios update to support the drive.  Not so; once more the engineers from Supermicro have it right once more with their foresight into what could be around the corner.   The mainboard correctly found the drive first time.

We have consistently seen read/write speeds just below 90 MB/s.  A remarkable set of figures.  Hard disc's of this nature normally struggle to reach 75 - 80MB/s.  Western Digital has done their homework well within the logic of the disc in all sectors.  What we did importantly find was that utilising the Caviar® Green™  at performance level found the Disc to have hardly any hit on the CPU usage which is good news for those intensive I/O outputs.  Therefore, we have no worries on that department as the 500GB platters will make short work of this.

Temperatures of the Disc as seen within the article are respectable for a unit of this nature surrounded by a very tight condensed area of the test system.  Test systems here are fully enclosed within the chassis to get the true ambient system temperatures, not that of a system lying on an open workbench.   What must be dually noted and taken into consideration is that the temperatures seen within the HD Tune Pro benchmark were recorded at the end of the working set of benchmarks and results.  So these are very respectable temperatures from a working system of this calibre.   As a point of note ambient average room temps were approximately 22.5C.  As a point of interest and to gauge the true localised heat of the hard disc at the bottom of the chassis, the lower fan of the chassis was disengaged fully.

Another important factor is the price of this beastie romping home at today’s rate of €299.00 Euros a reasonable price for a hard disc of this capacity.  Shipping, at going to print; drives should be available with OEM's S.I.'s and E-Tailers this month.

Although this is a short review, it has been very factual and hard hitting proving unequivocally that Western Digital have done their sums right with this magnificent monolithic muscular 3 ½” Disc.

www.3dprofessor.org award for Western Digitals Caviar® Green™ 2TB Hard Drive

EDITORS CHOICE – Mass Storage Desktop Hard Drive

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Pictures, System Set-Up and Benchmarks Used
Page 3 - PC MARK 2005 Advanced, ATTO Benchmark and Everest Ultimate Ver. 4.6
Page 4 - HD Tach 3.0.4.0
Page 5 - SiSoftware Sandra 2009 with SP1
Page 6 - HD Tune Pro Ver. 3 and File Transfer Copy Speeds
Page 7 - Conclusions