Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green and Black Hard Drives

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

Capacity

When it comes to storage capacity, the WD Caviar Black 2 TB (model WD2001FASS) and Caviar Green 2 TB (model WD20EADS) have a free capacity of 1.81 TB as shown above. This should be enough for many consumers and if it falls short, you can always buy more and build a nice RAID array!

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

Comparing the brand new WD Caviar Black 2 TB (model WD2001FASS) hard drive to the WD Caviar Green 2 TB (model WD20EADS) hard drive was an eye opener to say the least. The differences between the two drives are as big as night and day! This is tough, as there are so many drives on the market today it can be tough to tell the difference between two!

When it comes to performance the WD Caviar Black 2 TB is very fast. While benchmarking the drives we caught ourselves looking at the label and something clicked. The model number on this drive is WD2001FASS, which should stand for Fast AS Shiz! The Caviar Black 2 TB drive was on average 40% faster than the WD Caviar Green in all six of our benchmarks, which was amazing.

The WD Caviar Green 2 TB drive might not shine in the performance benchmarks, but it does shine in other areas like power consumption, heat and noise levels. It uses 4-5 Watts less power while completing seek operations and our testing showed that it was also 6C to 9C cooler depending on the state of the drive. This makes the Caviar Green 2 TB drive the ideal choice for energy-conscious customers or for those that are building a system in a chassis that doesn’t have good airflow. Noise levels on the Caviar Green are also much lower even at idle, so it is clearly the victor here as well. The Caviar Green series is the ideal choice if you are looking for lower power consumption, quieter operation and lower temperature numbers.

The 5-year warranty on the WD Caviar Black 2 TB hard drive is also a nice touch as it provides you two additional years of coverage over the WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive. Since the Caviar Black 2 TB costs nearly 30% more we feel like it should come with a better warranty and luckily it does. Not all high performance things in life get a longer warranty period though, so computer enthusiasts get lucky most of the time.

Speaking of costs, the WD Caviar Green 2 TB (model WD20EADS) hard drive can be picked up today for $209.99 shipped. The Caviar Black 2 TB (model WD2001FASS) hard drive has an MSRP of $299.99, but since it is so new the lowest price on our shopping engine is $325.99. Eventually the WD Caviar Black 2 TB will get down to $299.99 shipped, which is 42% more than the WD Caviar Green 2 TB. It looks like the old saying ‘You get what you pay for’ is worth its weight in gold here today. If you want ~40% better performance you better get ready to pay ~40% more money.

We really like the WD Caviar Green and Black 2 TB hard drives. They will serve their intended market perfectly and are great performing hard drives. The only negative about them is that they don’t support SATA 6GB/s, which is a very new interface that just was released on a select few Intel P55 motherboards this month. We asked Western Digital about when they will support SATA 6GB/s and got the usual answer of – “We [Western Digital] don’t discuss unannounced product and as of today we have not announced a 6Gb/s product.“

Legit Bottom Line: The WD Caviar Black 2 TB (model WD2001FASS) hard drive is insanely fast for how big it is and the WD Caviar Green 2 TB (model WD20EADS) is perfect for those that want big storage with energy efficiency.