Testing:
A handful of tests were conducted on the
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB hard drive using a system with the following key components:
» Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Dual Core processor
» ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution ATX motherboard
» Leadtek Limited WinFast GTX260 EXTREME+ 896MB video card
» G.Skill Pi Series PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 dual channel memory
» Nesteq EECS 700 Watt power supply
» Windows Vista Home Premium, 32-Bit
For comparison purposes, the following drives were compared head-to-head with the Green 2TB drive. Each drive was freshly formatted with one partition equal to the maximum capacity of the drive.
»
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB SATA hard drive
»
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB SATA hard drive
And the following list details the tests to be executed on all drives:
» HD Tune 2.55
» Performance Test V7.0
» CrystalDiskMark 2.2
» Thermal Testing
» Power Consumption Testing
HD Tune 2.55:
HD Tune version 2.55 was the first test executed. This simple benchmark application allows you to quickly and easily assess the performance of just about any hard drive, and the chart below provides the details for this collection of drives. Higher results are better for burst speeds and average read speeds, while lower scores are better for access time and CPU usage.
The compromise for this Western Digital drive being eco-friendly is that it isn't supposed to be as fast as some of the high performance drives. The results above show that while it might not be able to compete in terms of burst speed, it more than makes up for this with its average read speed. Results for CPU usage and access time were about even across the board.
