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| Introduction and Specifications | ||||
 The green technology movement is obviously in full swing now. Better efficiency through technological innovation has a trickle down effect to many facets of life style, technology and the environment. Whether motivated by cost or environmental reasons the benefits of eco-minded innovation will eventually be felt by all. When products can be produced cheaper through the use of green technologies due to cost savings to the manufacturer, consumers and the planet will eventually reap the benefits. Widespread adoption of green technology products, like Western Digital's Green Power Hard Drive for example, adds to the overall effectiveness of the green technology movement and increases aggregate resource savings in the enterprise and data center, as well as the end user markets. Western Digital is the first to market with a 2TB hard drive and it just so happens that it's a Caviar Green Power version drive. Not only is it flush with a much larger capacity but it also features "Green Power" technology that includes a host of features which make this a very consumer and environmentally friendly drive. Advertising lower temperatures, quieter operation, and the performance advantages of increased platter density, this drive is suited for a variety of storage usage models, especially those with tighter power consumption constraints.  ;) ;) ;) We covered Western Digital's foray into green technology in an earlier article testing both the consumer and enterprise versions of their 1TB Green Power hard drive . Since then there have been additional improvements in the drive and its firmware. Although an enterprise version is not offered at this time, it is sure to be in the works to generate vastly more cumulative power savings across the data center based on the sheer number of drives deployed. 
The Western Digital Green Power Caviar 2TB drive features 4 - 500GB platters, but Western Digital has not published any rotational speed specifics. Through the combination of Western Digital's IntelliSeek™, NoTouch™, and IntelliPower™ technologies WD claims their Green Power 2TB drive can offer power savings of "up to 40 percent" in comparison to other desktop drives. (Updated for technical accuracy) |
| Test System and HD Tach results | |||||||||||||
While testing the drives we used a KINGWIN KF-1000-BK 3.5" Internal hot swap rack attached to one of the six ASUS P5Q-E onboard 3Gb/s SATA II ports. A hot swap utility was used that allowed us to spin down each drive and swap it out without rebooting.
We began our testing with Simpli Software's HD Tach, which is described on the company's web site as such: "HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible."    The Western Digital Green Power 2 TB delivers impressive results in HD Tach. The read/write, random access, and burst speeds are all great for a consumer hard drive, especially one that employs "Green Technology". It even turns in the best write results among all the drives except for the high performance WD Velociraptor. |
| HD Tune Benchmarking | ||||
Next up we used HD Tune 2.55 to test the drives. HD Tune is somewhat similar to HD Tach in the tests it runs but uses its own methods and workload to arrive at performance results.    The HD Tune results show the WD Green Power 2TB only being bested by the Seagate 7200.11 in the transfer rates benchmark among the standard retail desktop drives. In the Random Access Time test, the WD GP 2TB turned in an impressive 12.8ms which was confirmed by multiple test runs. The Green Power 2TB drive performs especially well here and even under a full load uses less power than other retail drives, as you'll see later. |
| SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP2 | ||||
SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a suite of informational and benchmarking tools and utilities. We are using the Physical Disk benchmarks to arrive at additional performance results for comparison.   SiSoft Sandra's physical disk test results for the Western Digital Green Power 2TB were equally impressive with it coming in just under the Seagate 7200.11 in the read/write index tests. Random access tests provided slightly better results than the 1TB Seagate at 4ms write access and 15ms read access times. |
| ATTO Disk Benchmark | |||||||||||||||||||
ATTO is a benchmark that measures read and write transfer rates across a specific volume, displaying the results in bar graphs. For our drives we chose 8kB through 8192kB transfer sizes up to a max volume length of 32MB. We used blank, formatted drives with NTFS partitions to run our tests.
Here we see that the Western Digital Green Power 2TB ramps up quickly to speed and turns in impressive results from the beginning of the test. The WD GP 2TB has consistently turned in great write speeds and continues the trend when benchmarking with ATTO. |
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| Power Usage - Drive Temperatures | ||||||||
| Since we are reviewing a Green technology product in the Western Digital Green Power 2TB drive, we considered factors such as power consumption and drive temperature essential measurements in the evaluation.
To determine power consumption, we used a P3 Kill-A-Watt meter. The test system was plugged into the meter which was then attached to the power source. Wattage readings were taken from the meter under idle and load conditions. The load state was arrived at by running a battery of intensive benchmarks on the target drive. The test system ran at 124 watts without any of the test drives loaded.  The Western Digital Green Power 2TB delivers as promised with around 6 watts of power usage at idle and 10 watts under load. The closest competitor (counting out the 2.5" Velociraptor) was the Seagate 7200.11 1TB that used 8 watts at idle and 12 watts under load. Although this may not seem very significant it represents power savings of 25 and 17 percent respectively.
Our drive temperatures were arrived at by placing the drives in a Thermaltake BlacX external eSATA drive housing. The drive housing exposed the drive and allowed us to take temperature readings using a Fluke thermal meter probing the back of the drive. We used the highest temperature reading at idle and then under a heavy benchmark load for comparison. Although this is not extremely precise it does give you a good idea of the differences in temperature between the drives tested. The ambient room temperature during testing was 71 degrees Fahrenheit.  Here we see a noticeable difference in the heat generated by the WD Green Power 2 TB. Tests show 4 degrees Fahrenheit below the closest comparison drive during idle and almost 7 degrees Fahrenheit during load. |
| Summary and Conclusion | ||
Performance Summary: Western Digital's Green Power 2TB drive performed above average in our tests and did so while running very cool and quiet. It excelled at disk writes and delivered results at or near the top in all benchmarks when compared to the other consumer drives. The WDGP 2TB also ramped up quickly and performed well in the ATTO benchmark. This is impressive from a drive that also provides the added benefits of using "Green Technology" and consuming less power.  The Western Digital Green Power 2TB performs as promised and is part of a larger movement towards energy efficiency in technology. We like products that are good for the environment and perform as expected, whether you're simply a cool and quiet computing type or more concerned about your carbon footprint. It's our belief that "green" technology should be applied whenever possible in computing architectures. Western Digital is at the forefront with their Green Power drives for now but expect offerings from other drive vendors to follow soon. The WDGP 2TB will fit certain applications very well. Home Theater PC's for example, with only one drive slot, can use it to provide 2TB of quiet, cool, energy efficient storage. When you consider the fact that you traditionally would have to pair up at least two drives to equal the 2TB storage space, the energy efficiency features of the Western Digital Green Power 2TB drive become even more of a factor. With a street price of $299 it may be a little more costly considering you could get two Western Digital 1.5TB Green Power drives at almost the same price. But as expected there is always bit of a premium (at least temporarily) for the largest capacity hard drive available on the market. We're willing to bet the masses will ante up however and feel that price premium isn't completely unjustified. 
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