Western Digital’s Caviar Green range of drives eschews maximum performance in favour of green credentials – potentially important in an age where people pay attention to the wattage of their machines and opt for low-power media-centre PCs.
To this end, Caviar Green drives have a range of environmentally-friendly features. The rotational speed of the drive, for instance, varies between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm – depending on the model – to save power. And here an impressively low power draw of 4W is the result.
Understandably, there’s a performance trade-off. A read speed of 60.5MB/sec is the slowest we’ve seen this month, with a write speed of 52.2MB/sec proving equally disappointing. Access times of 14ms and 5ms for reading and writing files are good, but they can’t compete with the likes of our Labs-winning Samsung drives.
Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a green drive and don’t want to spend a fortune, the 500GB Western Digital is worth considering.
Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 500GB |
| Hard disk usable capacity | 465GB |
| Hard disk type | Mechanical |
| Cache size | 16MB |
| Spindle speed | 7,200RPM |
| Seek time (ms) | 14ms |
| Cost per gigabyte | 8.8p |
Noise and power | |
| Idle power consumption | 4W |
Performance tests | |
| HD Tach burst speed | 206.9MB/sec |
| HD Tach random access speed | 14.1ms |
| HD Tach average sequential read speed | 64.2MB/sec |
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