Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB review

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Verdict:

A bit slow but very cheap, this is one of the most cost-effective 2TB disks around

Review Date: 13 Dec 2012

Price when reviewed: £72

Buy it now for: £72
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.okobe.co.uk

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

User Rating

ExpertReviews Award

If you're after an incredibly cheap 2TB hard disk, you're unlikely to find much better value than the Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB, which costs just under 4p per GB. Cost is nothing if the performance isn't there to match.

The Caviar Green range is designed to save power, so has a lower spindle speed of just 5,400rpm, compared to the normal 7,200rpm of a normal desktop disk. Western Digital has implemented caching algorithms designed to mitigate the performance reduction that results from this.

In our large file transfer tests, the disk's performance was in line with its full-speed rivals, averaging 139.8MB/s based on a write speed of 133.1MB/s and a read speed of 146.4MB/s. However, its slow spin speed makes an impact on its performance in small file transfers. Here, it averages just 47.1MB/s with a slow write speed of 37.6MB/s and a read speed of 56.6MB/s. That makes it better suited to being used as a data disk than as a system disk.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, particularly if you've already got a fast boot hard disk or SSD in your system. If you just want a lot of storage at the best price, the Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB is hard to beat and it wins a Budget Buy award.

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