Western Digital’s Caviar Green Gets Tested

It’s hard to look at any product nowadays and not read something to the extent of it being “energy efficient”. Heck, the product might literally bear the color green just to prove it. I don’t think it’s all for naught though. Producing energy efficient products isn’t just smart, it’s common sense. There’s little need of sucking more power than we need to, just for the sake of it.

Despite the fact that hard drives are nowhere near as power-hungry as a processor or graphics card, they aren’t escaping the slimming down to become more efficient either. Our friends at the Tech Report have taken Western Digital’s latest Caviar Green for a spin, which promises to be fast, reliable, quiet and energy efficient, and according to TR’s tests, it’s hit its mark.

The drive isn’t that fast given its goals, at around 5400RPM, but for those who are looking to build a file-server, HTPC or want a storage drive in their PC, it proves to be a great choice. The silence itself will be enough to please some people, because when 1TB can sound near-silent, it’s easy to smile. The Caviar Green costs around $20 more than the normal 1TB offering, so it’s up to you to really decide whether the premium is worth it. Depending on your needs, it probably will be.

The idea behind the Caviar Green is a simple one. For some applications, be they home theater PCs, secondary desktop storage, or a home file server stuffed into a closet, you don’t need the fastest hard drive on the block-just one that’s fast enough. Those markets are likely to prefer drives with lower noise levels and power consumption, which the Caviar Green is more than eager to provide, ideally while maintaining an acceptable level of performance.