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Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB hard drive

Very, very quiet - and very, very capacious

WD has also included its "StableTrac" feature, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce vibration and "stabilise platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations".

WD Caviar Green 2TB

WD Caviar Green 2TB
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This is the sort of thing that we'd expect to see on a high-speed 10,000rpm VelociRaptor and it comes as a real surprise in a 5400rpm drive. However, it seems to deliver the desired result.

As you'd expect, WD has done its best to reduce the impact of the low spin speed, so the interface is 3Gb/s SATA and there's a whopping 32MB of cache.

The 2TB Caviar Green's price isn’t yet certain but it seems to be settling around the £205 mark, which compares reasonably well with the £91 1TB Green or the £131 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11. Our experience with WD Green drives is limited to the WD1000FYPS RE2-GP that featured in our four 1TB HDD round-up and which failed to impress us.

By contrast, the 1.5TB Seagate was an absolute gem and we loved it to bits, right up to the point when reports came flooding in that Barracuda 7200.11 drives were dying at an horrendous rate. The 1.5TB model doesn’t appear to be affected by the same iffy firmware but there’s no denying that high-capacity Seagate drives currently have a question mark hovering over them.

WD Caviar Green 2TB

WD 1TB and 2TB Drives
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We compared the 2TB Green with a 1TB Caviar Black and also dragged out a few test results for the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11, but were unable to run a full comparison as the sample was whisked off by Seagate. We’ve also included figures for the Intel X25-M solid-state drive, but they’re not so much a reference point as an indication of the ultimate performance that can be achieved by a devilishly fast storage device in Windows.

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