[Brian]

If you are the kind of user who wants it all - performance, low power consumption, and copious storage capacity - in a single desktop drive, pay attention. Whether you're shopping for storage to fill up a home media server or you're just looking to max out the capacity of your current desktop, the latest high-capacity, low-power drives - like the 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green up for review today - make a lot of sense for the kinds of computing most of us do.

Full Review

[Mkruer]

Performance wise going from a WD 640GB Blue to the WD 2TB Green, I have not noticed much difference other then when windows 7 pre scans the directory. Then the drive seems a little slower, but nothing major.

[Mickey]

Just a nitpick: Intellipower does not feature variable speed spindle motors. The line, as a whole, has different (and fixed) spin speeds depending on the product. Any particular product does not vary its speed based on usage. This was a confusing point when Intellipower was first released and since has been clarified.

[Brian]

Good point Mickey, I'll clarify with an edit.

[Spod]

Advanced Format:
"Windows users (including WHS users) from Vista forward should have no trouble,"
Followed by
"...you'll have to be even more creative in patching together a workable solution if you happen to use Windows Home Server 2003. We tested hits particular drive..."

So is WHS fine, or troublesome? Did you mean Windows Server 2003 in the second quote? And "hits" should read "this" in the second quote.

Is Advanced Format still an issue with older OSes if the drive's in a RAID array?

"Not that optimal performance on the 2TB Caviar Green is only observed when the tests are aligned for 4K read and writes." Should read "note".

What about acoustics? With many of these 2 TB, slower spinning, lower power, quieter running drives headed for HTPC and similar usage, what can you say about noise levels? I know you have future plans around noise testing, but the review's not complete without some comment.
Even just something like "full acoustic analysis of these drives will follow in a later article, but subjectively, all were equally quiet during idle, drive X was a tad noisier when seeking, but drive y produced more vibration than the other two. All were significantly quieter than 7200 RPM 2TB units"... or whatever.

Still, a good review, and I'd be interested to know why the Samsung uses so much less power at startup (though of course that's not likely to be a major issue for most people).

[TSullivan]

The alignment tool would be needed with WHS 2k3 it appears although we didn't have a system to fully test on hand. Even Windows 7 threw of for a loop with some of the WD advanced format drives. During the 750GB Scorpio Blue review we had a problem where deleting the partition inside the Win 7 OS and creating a new one, it would show up unaligned and need to be corrected by the application. Switching from a MBR to GPT back to MBR partition style corrected it though. Linux has been one the only operating systems that has worked without fail time in and time out with these new drives. They are instantly recognized and fdisk will automatically pad the partition so it lines up on the correct sector borders. Windows it seems to work 80% of the time.

In regards to the RAID setup, from our testing with the LSI 9260 RAID card the OS still has to support sending 4k aligned packets to the drive to get optimal performance. If you are sending unaligned requests the performance will still be very poor. You see this same effect with some SSDs but at their insane speeds a small blip still has the drive vastly outperforming normal hard disks.

Noise has so far not been a problem with the green drives. Unlike a 7200RPM drive you generally cant even hear when these drives start up. You can tell when you are working obviously by picking it up and feeling the gyroscopic forces at work, but these things really are silent. Accessing the drive they are still pretty quiet, although not in the realm of a 2.5" notebook drive just yet.

Power on the Samsung has a simple answer right now for startup. The 12v value got a 1 chopped off in the chart making progress. We are rendering a new chart now. As a result it is still the lowest on the list, but not by such a huge amount.

Sorry about the errors, sometimes these things slip past the best of us. This review someone seems to have skipped their coffee in the morning while editing.

[kittle]

Thanks for the updates and such.
did you guys take any temprature measurements during the review? Thats always something I look for, but its getting harder to find.

[Brian]

Honestly, we haven't quite found a standard that we like for temps. We are considering ways to recreate the exact internal and external scenarios for every drive.

What temps are most important to you? Max, idle, ???

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

Measuring temperature is really different, that's probably why it's not done very often.Well, it's easy to get some number, but comparing drives is difficult. You can't compare values from the internal sensor, because they can be mounted at any position. And the HDD case temperature can be distributed in different ways for different drives, depending on internal component choice and placement.

IMO power consumption is a better indicator, since ultimately all the consumed power ends up as heat in your case. It doesn't matter much how it gets there, as 7200 rpm drives aren't very hot these days anyway (mid 40°C - absolutely fine).

MrS

[Brian]

Right...that's the argument against temp readings, but I still think they have some value if there's a reliable way to get them. At least our power data is sound and repeatable.