The test system consists of an Intel DX38BT motherboard with a Core 2 Q9300 processor, 2GB of Kingston 1333MHz DDR 3 memory, a passively cooled AMD Radeon HD 3450 graphics card and the Intel SSD, so the rig is very quiet indeed. We ran 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate with HD Tach 3 and the hard drive element of PCMark05, and also timed the transfer of a 2GB folder of files from one drive to another.

Eco friendly?

The 1TB Black delivers similar performance to the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11, although it loses out to the Seagate by a narrow margin all along the way. It would be unfair to call the Caviar Black noisy, but the 33dBA noise rating under load makes it clearly audible and prone to causing vibration inside your PC. By contrast, the 2TB Green is very quiet indeed and is effectively silent.

Our synthetic benchmark tests show that the 2TB Green is marginally slower than the 1TB Black in average read and write tests, but the burst speed and random access times of the Green put it ahead of the Black. Transferring files within the drive took longer with the 2TB Green than it did with either the 1TB Black or 1.5TB Seagate, which is exactly what we'd expect to see considering the Green's slower rotational speed.

The surprise came when we hooked up each drive to the Intel SSD and found that the 2TB Green was marginally faster than the 1TB Black. WD claims that its IntelliSeek technology "calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration", and this may well be evidence of the technology in action. Alternatively, it could simply be the result of the increased areal density that delivers 500GB per platter.

All we know is that we can hardly wait for a 2TB Caviar Black with 7200rpm spindle speed.

Verdict

WD’s new 2TB Caviar Green is surprisingly fast yet it's also very quiet. Besides, what self-respecting power PC owner doesn't want a 2TB drive? ®

More Storage Reviews...

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WD Caviar Green 2TB

WD hits new heights with the World’s first 2TB hard drive, and it's a nice one too.

Price: £205 (TBC) RRP

More Info: WD's Caviar Green page

COMMENTS

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Latest Comments

Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 22:50 GMT

Simon Breden

Re: How do folk back these up?

You're right that RAID is not the same as a backup, it just provides protection against data loss due to built-in redundancy.

In some advanced file system like Sun's ZFS or NetApp's offerings, there *is* protection against data being unintentionally corrupted or deleted by the user, application or OS: they are called snapshots. Files and directories referenced by snapshots cannot be deleted until the referring snapshot is deleted -- so there is your protection against loss. Also files/dirs referenced by snapshots cannot be modified -- these file systems employ a method called 'copy-on-write' which means that if a file referenced by a snapshot is modified, the file system creates a copy. If I remember correctly, the common blocks of the two files are not duplicated, to save space, but don't quote me on that :)

A traditional 2-drive mirror is fine until you need, in this case, 2.1 TB. Also traditional mirrors often don't repair files that can't be read -- the file system/RAID controller often just returns the data on the good half of the mirror. However, ZFS also repairs the faulty file on the bad side of the mirror, as indeed it does in any redundant setup: mirror, RAID-Z1 (like RAID 5), or RAID-Z2 (like RAID 6).

For backup/syncing of files that you mention, again, ZFS offers a way of doing this -- with one important difference and huge benefit: you will never lose any data that gets deleted if you use (1) automatic snapshotting (via cron every 30 minutes or whatever), and (2) use 'zfs send/receive' to send an initial full backup and subsequent incremental backups, in which ZFS detects diffs between snapshots and sends only the differences, to another storage pool, which might be on the same machine or a different machine on the LAN/WAN.

These links might be of further interest:

http://breden.org.uk/2008/05/12/home-fileserver-zfs-snapshots/

http://breden.org.uk/2008/05/12/home-fileserver-backups-from-zfs-snapshots/

http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/date/20081013

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf

http://blogs.sun.com/timf/en_IE/entry/zfs_automatic_snapshots_0_11

http://channelsun.sun.com/video/opensolaris+demo+time+slider+in+opensolaris+2008.11/2972356001

I'll get me coat -- I'm off to the pub... :)

Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 05:47 GMT

Chris McFaul