WD Green 2TB: Cold-blooded Heavyweight

The folks at Western Digital haven't been resting on their laurels, trying to continuously improve their standard HDD section as technology improves. The result is the new Green HDD series, with a capacity of 2 TB spread over three platters. In comparison with its predecessor, which had a platter more, the increased data density has not only reduced the number of heads/platters, but also brought some other improvements along, perhaps most importantly, a lower price.

Using the already well-established nomenclature, the Green series HDDs are made to reduce power consumption and noise. The new version (WD20EARS) demonstrates this principle to the fullest. During testing, whatever miseries we put it to, the HDD simply refused to heat up, remaining warm at best, and mostly only a few degrees warmer than its environment. As far as noise is concerned, with a maximum of 30 dB in peaks, it was virtually unnoticeable when inside the enclosure, and we could barely notice it even when transferring data externally. Its consumption is expectedly great, varying between 3.7 W in idle mode and a maximum of 6 W under load, which makes it one of the most efficient HDDs of today.

All of this has had to compromise something, and that's performance. Despite spinning at 7200 RPM and having 64 MB of cache, just like its stronger brother from the Black series, test results are more modest nevertheless, with the difference being the greatest in random access data timings. As this number means a lot when manipulating a large number of files, that fact alone makes this disk undesirable as the system partition, and by extension declares it a multimedia storage disk, fit for storing music, films etc. – bluntly put, this is a perfect D: for most users: power-saving and spacious.

Besides its purpose of a secondary internal hard-drive, WD Green 2 TB can be very neatly placed inside a media centre just as well, devices the likes of ASUS' O!Play HD2, which contains separate spaces for mounting 3.5” HDDs. Silence, a large available space and low heat emission are definitely features that owners of these drives will be able to appreciate, making this HDD a best buy for them.