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Technical Details
- WD Caviar Green hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% and offer best-in-class acoustics
- A fine-tuned balance of spin speed (5400 RPM), transfer rate and caching algorithms designed
- IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
- 1 TB capacity holds up to 200,000 digital photos, 250,000 MP3 files, and 120 hours of HD video.
Product Details
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Product Description
From the Manufacturer
WD Caviar Green Hard Drives – Cool, quiet.
The WD Caviar Green desktop SATA hard drives give you the space you need to hold enormous amounts of software, photos and videos. These drives make it possible to build high capacity, cool and quiet systems, while delivering the right balance of system performance and energy conservation.
Why you should choose WD Caviar Green:
WD Caviar Green hard drives provide high capacity storage while using up to 40% less power than traditional 7200 RPM drives. In addition, these hard drives are quieter and cooler than traditional 7200 RPM drives.
WD GreenPower Technology yields lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and low acoustics perfect for ultra-quiet PCs and external drives.
WD's IntelliPower technology delivers both significant power savings and solid performance. Additionally, WD Caviar Green drives consume less current during startup allowing lower peak loads on systems as they are booted.
Store up to 1 TB of photos, videos, music and files on a single drive.
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Ideal for:
- Adding lots of storage in desktop PCs or external drives and NAS devices
- Adding extra storage space for photos, videos and music
- Environmentally-conscious individuals seeking reduced power consumption
Features:
SATA 3 Gb/s interface - The industry standard and most common interface.
NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
Advanced Format (AF) - Technology being adopted by WD and other drive manufacturers to continue growing hard drive capacities.
New drives featuring AF are optimized for operation with Windows 7, Windows Vista and Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard. For older operating systems such as Windows XP, users must run the free WD Align software utility to achieve the full performance of the drive.
Desktop / Consumer RAID environments - WD Caviar Green Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications. (RAID-0 / RAID-1)*
*Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Green Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD's Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.
Leading the way to green hard drives - WD led the industry in creating a new category of hard drives that use less power and help reduce the world's energy demands one computer user at a time. These drives consume significantly less power than standard drives spinning at 7200 RPM. All WD Caviar Green drives are lead and halogen free, resulting in less pollutants getting into our environment. Beyond the product level, WD's green initiative goes even further focusing on recycling and improving the cleanliness of the air, water and land in the locations surrounding WD facilities.
Upgrading your drive is easy - WD Acronis TrueImage, available as a free download on the WD Support site, enables you to copy all your data to a new drive so you don't have to reinstall your operating system to get all the benefits of a new drive. Note: Bare drive does not include any cables or mounting hardware.
The WD advantage - WD puts our products through extensive Functional Integrity Testing (F.I.T.) prior to any product launch. On average, each new product goes through 600,000 hours of testing. WD also has a detailed Knowledge Base with more than 1,000 helpful articles. You can also call toll-free support 7 days per week in the U.S. and Canada. See the WD Support site for full details.
WD-certified packaging - All WD drives purchased from Amazon.com are shipped in WD-certified hard drive packaging. It is designed and fully tested to provide WD products with the highest of safety while in transit. With WD-certified packaging, you can rest assured that your WD hard drive will arrive safely, fully protected, non-descript, easy-open package.
Compatibility
Works with Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000, Mac and Linux operating systems.
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Product Description
Customer Reviews
The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters - so a 1TB drive has just two platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available. The new models have 64MB of cache.
ADVANCED FORMAT: There's another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512B sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512B logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides an improvement in burst speeds.
ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.
The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install - then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their "Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility" web page - anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.
So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say "WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7." This drive might not a good choice for some XP users - you'll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.
VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, "Western Digital's Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins." They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.
LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.
OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom's Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled "Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB," with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google "Pros And Cons Of Going Green."
PC the drive went into: Stock Intel Q6600, Gigabyte GA-EP45-D3SL, 8GB DDR2, and a ATI HD4870.
The Windows install wasn't that old and I didn't really want to mess with getting her all her stuff back so I used a Clonezilla Live CD to clone the old drive to the new one. I then booted straight into Windows 7 off the new drive. Windows asked me to restart so I did and the system was up and running without incident. I then went into the Windows 7 disk manager and extended the partition to fill the whole drive.
Knowing this was an Advanced Format drive but unsure if the alignment would be correct due to the cloning, I downloaded the bootable image for the align utility from the Western Digital site and burned it to a CD. I ran the utility and it indicated that the partition was aligned correctly and there was nothing that needed to be done.
The old drive showed as a 5.4 and the new one as a 5.9 on the Windows Experience Index. I didn't think that was too bad coming from an older 7200 RPM drive to this. I was a little worried it would be slower but that isn't the case. I haven't personally used the PC enough myself to know but my wife says she notices it is a bit faster and things are quicker to load.
This drive for me was a worthwhile upgrade and money well spent to this point. Only time will tell about the reliability as with any drive.
Just a couple of words of caution: this hard drive is packaged in a bare-bones package, and comes with no instructions or other information. If you have never installed an internal hard drive, you may want to get some information online about what is the best way of doing it for your compute.
The unit has now died. Just lost 1 tb of data. Im sad now, I don't know if ill ever have all the data I just lost back. No symptoms.
