Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS: 2 Terabyte hard drive tested

Hitachi was the first company to reach the Terabyte; last year Seagate exceeded the former limit with an 1.5 TB drive - now Western Digital take the next step: Two Terabyte in a single 3.5 inch hard drive.

Details: WD Caviar Green WD20EADS
The hard drive is part of Western Digital's Green Caviar series and runs at about 5,400 rpm. The capacity of 2,000 gigabyte (2 Terabyte) sets a new record and matches 1,862 GiByte. At such sizes it is more important than ever to distinguish between Gigabyte and Gibibyte - otherwise some customers might wonder where the "missing” 138 gigabyte went lost.

Four platters are rotating inside the WD20EADS, each of them 500 gigabyte big. This data density is reached by other hard drives, like Seagate's Barracuda 7200.12, but up to now nobody combined four such platters. The cache is 32 MiByte big. The hard drive is connected via SATA; NCQ and AAM are supported.

Test: WD Caviar Green WD20EADS
People who buy such a hard drive primarily need one thing: space. The performance might be secondary for a pure data storage or back-up drive. But nevertheless we tested the WD20EADS with the hard drive benchmark h2benchw; the host adapter was an ICH10R from Intel. Result: 77.4 megabyte on average while reading and 77.5 MB/s when writing. For comparison: Samsung's F1 Ecogreen HD103UI reaches almost 70 MB/s on average at the same touring speed, the old Caviar Green is even slower. A Samsung F1 HD103UJ with one terabyte reaches 95.4/93.7 MB/s - but it runs at 7,200 rpm, just like Seagate's 1.5 TB device (99.4/98.8 MB/s). Nevertheless the maximal transfer rate of the WD drive is slightly above 100 MB/s, something no 5,400 drive could do up to now. All in all the results are quite good for the rpm.

The average access times when reading (14.4 ms) and writing (7.1 ms) are on the same level as those from the fast turning competitors. Those benefit from the higher transfer rate when copying. The Seagate 1.5 TB needs 2:21 minutes to copy a 5.5 GiByte file on itself while the WD needs two more minutes to complete the task. But the Caviar Green is more quite - exact loudness and power consumption test results will be delivered soon.