Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green

Results Analysis and Final Thoughts

Well, it's a pretty disappointing picture as far as performance goes for the Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green. Theoretical performance as measured by HD-Tach is uniformly poor and while performance in our write and copy tests for both MP3 and ISO file patterns was reasonable if unimpressive, file read speeds were poor, especially when reading the larger ISO file pattern.

However the most glaring performance issues were found during our real world testing, with the drive one of the slowest drives we’ve tested when it comes to booting Windows Vista and the slowest drive when it comes to loading Crysis, making it a thoroughly unattractive boot disk for any sort of gaming or high performance PC.

In fact, despite its admittedly enormous capacity and ultra quiet operation, there’s not a great deal with which to recommend the Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green. Not only is it extremely expensive at over £260 (bizarrely so considering even 1.5TB drives are half the price), with twice the cost per GB of faster 1TB hard drives, but it’s comparatively slow in every department too, making this a decisively niche drive suiting only home theatre PCs or set ups which require massive amounts of storage in just one 3.5” drive bay.


Even then we struggle to see the advantages over a cheaper and just as quiet 1TB Caviar Green, which sells for just £70, unless your media collection is truly mammoth, in which case you’d be foolish to entrust a whole 2TB of your precious data to a single hard disk without sufficient back up. Like it or not drive failures happen every day and putting 2TB of data onto a single disk is a serious liability unless you have some kind of backup in place.

So, while Western Digital might have been the first manufacturer to reach the coveted 2TB capacity in a single drive, the end result is pretty disappointing. Expensive, slow and niche in the extreme, it’s a drive with limited uses especially in high performance enthusiast systems and is only really remarkable for its sheer size and quiet operation. Hopefully Western Digital's inevitable Caviar Blue and Caviar Black 2TB drives will be a significant improvement but for now we’d strongly advise against making the jump to 2TB.

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• 6/10

• Value
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• 4/10

• Overall
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• 5/10

Score Guide