WD's 2nd Gen GP: More Speed, Less Power

Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB

A few months ago, WD shuffled around its product portfolio and now offers the Black (high performance), Blue (mainstream), and Green (energy-efficient) series. The Caviar Black is currently one of the fastest 7,200 RPM 3.5” terabyte drives on the market.

You have to be careful when selecting a Western Digital Green drive, as there has been a change of technology that the model numbers don’t reflect. The initial Caviar GP that we reviewed in 2007 is called the WD10EACS. It is based on four platters and runs at 5,400 RPM. The latest terabyte drive is now called WD10EADS and it utilizes a higher areal density to store one terabyte on only three platters. The WD10EADS also now has 32 MB instead of 16 MB cache memory. However, there still is a WD10EACS with 16 MB cache on the data sheet, as well as three more versions at 750, 640, and 500 GB, all suffixed AACS. The current WD10EACS and EADS drives are rated at up to 111 MB/s throughput, while the drive we reviewed a year ago did not reach 80 MB/s. Be sure to get the current version, which you’ll recognize by the green sticker and the production date that should be no older than the summer of 2008.

Fewer Platters = Less Power

The three-platter design made it possible to improve transfer rates and reduce power consumption at the same time. We measured a drive idle power of 2.8 W, which is less than any other 3.5” drive. By comparison, WD’s first-generation GP drive required 5.3 W in idle, and Samsung’s EcoGreen F1 drive sits at 4.3 W. And WD’s dominance continues in our application power tests, where we check performance and performance per watt for workstation random I/O and streaming reads. In both cases, the new Caviar Green does better than you’d expect from a low-power drive.