TREADLAYERS.COM: WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR GREEN WD20EADS 2TB

WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR GREEN WD20EADS 2TB

In 2008, we saw the first 1TB drives. Western Digital changed the game by creating the Green Power series of drives by dynamically chaning the spindle speed from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM, saving power, noise, and a little bit of performance. Now, WD has done it again by doubling that capacity and delivering us the first 2TB drive. Here are its specs:

Performance Specifications

Transfer Rates
	Buffer To Host (Serial ATA)	3 Gb/s (Max)

Physical Specifications
	Formatted Capacity	2,000,398 MB
	Capacity	2 TB
	Interface	SATA 3 Gb/s
	User Sectors Per Drive	3,907,029,168

Physical Dimensions
English
	Height	1.028 Inches
	Length	5.787 Inches
	Width	4.00 Inches
	Weight	1.61 Pounds

Metric
	Height	26.1 mm
	Length	147 mm
	Width	101.6 mm
	Weight	0.73 kg

Environmental Specifications
Shock
	Operating Shock (Read)	65G, 2 ms
	Non-operating Shock	300G, 2 ms

Acoustics
	Idle Mode	25 dBA (average)
	Seek Mode 0	29 dBA (average)
	Seek Mode 3	26 dBA (average)

Vibration
	Operating
	Linear	20-300 Hz, .75G (0 to peak)
	Random	10-300 Hz, 0.008 g² / Hz

	Non-operating
	Low Frequency	5-20 Hz, 0.195 inches (double amplitude)
	High Frequency	20-500 Hz, 4.0G (0 to peak)

Electrical Specifications
Current Requirements
	Power Dissipation
	Read/Write	6.00 Watts
	Idle	3.7 Watts
	Standby	0.80 Watts
	Sleep	0.80 Watts

As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. As used for buffer or cache, one megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes. As used for transfer rate or interface, megabyte per second (MB/s) = one million bytes per second, megabit per second (Mb/s) = one million bits per second, and gigabit per second (Gb/s) = one billion bits per second.

Our test platform is as follows:

Motherboard
Asus M4A79T Deluxe

CPUs AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2GHz

Memory Crucial 4GB DDR3-1600

Power Supply Silverstone ST50EF-Plus

Boot HDD Seagate Barracuda 40GB

OS Windows XP SP3

Now we go to the individual drive test results:

HDTach 3.0.4.0, 32MB Zones

(WOULD NOT RUN)
HDTach 3.0.4.0, VAR Zones

Atto Disk Benchmark

Performance of the WD20EADS drive is not stellar at all. Reads are great, but writes are almost half that, in the Atto test. As for HD Tach, the reads and writes are closer together. Note how the VAR Zones test is missing because the test refused to complete - possibly a bug in the software because of the massive 2TB size? Anyhow, we see that in the 1st generation Green Power drive, writes are close to the 2TB unit, but the reads now are far better. All in all, the 2TB's major selling point is its size and low-power consumption. This is ideal for HTPCs and other applications requiring massive amounts of non-mission-critical storage. Perhaps the RAID Edition would be more appealing to performance-oriented users who'd put these drives in some kind of array.