I review an already established HDD for servers and networked storage, now at a much affordable price. Given its low power and noise, it's also a suitable drive for HTPCs.
The 1TB Caviar Green has gone through several iterations before reaching its current form: the first device had four platters and only 16MB of cache and latter transitioned to three platters while retaining the WD10EACS model. The model here reviewed today is the WD10EADS model, the one that retains the denser(and faster) three plate design as the older EACS but comes with 32MB of cache.
The caviar green line has a lower power consumption due to spinning plates slower than even some laptop HDDs, at 5400RPM. The lower speed will cause some performance loss compared to high-end 7200 RPM HDDs but this typically isn't more than 20-30MB/s, which translates into 20-30% difference. The Caviar Green makes up for lower RPMs by having denser plates, which manages it to surpass HDDs of previous generations, even though they are spinning at 7200 RPM.
Benchmarks
For reference, let's take a look an old, 7200 RPM, Seagate Barracuda ATA 133:
Average throughput is less than 50MB/s and burst reads from the cache don't even come close to 100MB/s.
Now, the newcomer:
The Caviar Green 1TB shows a burst read performance of almost 220MB/s and the average reads are close to double that of the old Seagate at 83.4MB/s. The performance curve is more sparse though, with more than 100MB/s being achieved on the first sectors but dropping to half of that towards the end. If performance is critical to you, you may need to consider the Caviar Black line. For most intents and purposes, the performance is great, due to the enhanced platter density.
Other measures of performance can be found by using IOMeter, which provides a more in-depth look at the characteristics of the drive:
This IOMeter test runs 50% random reads and 50% random writes, over 30 minutes, with a queuing depth of 100 commands, somewhat higher than you can probably stress your system to do.
The drive behaved admirably with a maximum latency of 57ms and an average of 11.4ms. The low value of 57ms shows us that the drive has no problems coping with a high number of requests, something which can't be said for first generation SSDs - they failed miserably by delivering as much as 2 seconds of maximum response time(which stalled the computer for that time). Random read performance is normal for HDDs at 0.17 KB/s, almost 10 times the 0.02KB/s that SSDs based on the J-Micron JMF602B can achieve, as with most flash media with no cache.
Final words
The Caviar Green is one of the best reviewed HDDs @ Newegg compared to other models - in fact, that was one of my criteria for choosing the 1TB model over the 1.5TB Caviar Green.
The drive is very silent idling but does make some noise when seeking, a bit too much when compared with the idle noise, but well below industry standards. Vibration is also very low, certainly the lowest I have ever seen, rivaling even 2.5" HDDs and ensuring that almost no noise will be generated from vibrating the computer chassis. It's an HDD suitable for HTPC uses but if you do want total silence, an HDD case like the Scythe Quite Drive is all that you need.
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