Final Thoughts

The Western Digital Caviar Green in 2TB form has a lot of strong features and innovative technology to impress us just with its specifications alone. New and innovative usually comes with a drawback and many consumers tend not to take it lightly, cost. Still, there is the whole "Green" aspect, but outside of California and the server room, most of us enthusiasts could care less. It might not be the most politically correct thing to say, but some of us live in places that still have trees and grass on land that we own.

Western Digital has a strong suite of IP that they are rolling into the new Green Series that allow the drives to perform quickly when asked to and morph into low power sleepers when performance is not needed. Other features like the custom algorithms allow the drives to perform well in tests like Read and Write Access, something we didn't expect to see at all.

The only real drawback with the WDC Caviar Green 2TB is the cost. At 299 USD it has a high MSRP for a desktop drive and Newegg will not help us out with the cost for a couple of weeks. Many people will ignore the cost and see the feature set that is matched with good performance and pull the trigger right away, but I think in a couple of weeks we will start to see the cost slide a little.

The power saving features that Western Digital has incorporated into their Green Series products is very impressive. For enthusiasts it doesn't matter too much if your storage drives use 3 watts less power than a competing product when you are already using 250 watts for your graphics card, 160 from your processor and who knows how much more power from your array of VelociRaptors. Having 2TB of storage in an external enclosure that doesn't require active cooling is a positive, no matter what kind of user you are. And I am sure in time WDC will take advantage of the new drives and make some popular My Book products with the new technology.

Windows 32-bit users should be made aware that the capacity limit for a single partition is 2TB. If you plan to RAID a set of drives, keep this in mind. Windows 64-bit users get a little more room to play with.