Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB review

The Caviar Green is one of the few disks to use Advanced Format technology. This uses smaller disk sectors to increase the available amount of storage space, but if you’re still using Windows XP then you have use a freely downloadable utility to format the Caviar Green for use with your PC to take advantage of this.

Instead of having a set, uniform spindle speed the Caviar Green disks all have slightly different spindle speeds set somewhere between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm during the manufacturing process. This is supposed to ensure that the drive runs at its optimal power-saving speed, but means you’re never quite sure of what you’re going to get in terms of performance.

Although we can’t test Western Digital’s claims of greater power efficiency, we did put the Caviar Green through our demanding file transfer tests. Unfortunately, while it fared well at reading files, it was very slow at writing them. Large files were read at just over 100MB/s, which is only a few megabytes behind the fastest front runners. The Caviar Green’s speed of 99.4MB/s reading small files was actually one of the fastest we’ve seen for an internal disk. Despite these quick read speeds, it wasn’t especially fast in our Crysis level loading test where it took 43 seconds – the longest time we’ve seen.

However, large files were written at a sluggish 77.7MB/s, while small files were written at an incredibly slow 25.1MB/s. We were so surprised by this last score, which is slower than most USB2 external disks, that we ran the test again on another sample disk but got a similar score.

Given its wildly inconsistent performance, we can’t recommend the Caviar Green. There are faster, similarly priced disks, such as Samsung’s 1TB SpinPoint F3, which are far better value.