Western Digital Caviar Green Power HDD tested

A while ago Western Digital unleashed a new series of Caviar Green Power hard drives which feature a lower power consumption. The Tech Report decided to check out the performance and power consumption of this HDD, for their tests they used the 1TB version.

Squeezing a terabyte into a 3.5" hard drive form factor is no easy task, but Western Digital has done it in style using platters that offer a much higher areal density than its other drives. The Caviar GP makes use of perpendicular recording techniques similar to those used by the Caviar SE16 and RE2. Those drives only manage to pack 188GB per platter, though, while the GP shoehorns 250GB onto each disk.

Higher density platters can improve performance by allowing the drive head to access more data over shorter physical distances. This effect is evident when we look at the GP's maximum buffer-to-disk transfer rate, which is nearly 200Mbps faster than that of the Caviar SE16, despite the drive's sub-7,200-RPM spindle speed.

Check it out over here. The site concludes the drive is the most power-efficient drive they ever tested but also found that it's not such a good choice for power users as the performance of this drive is lower than other WD HDDs. However, if you're planning to use this drive in a HTPC it's a very good choice as it's very silent compared to the other HDDs they tested.