WD Caviar & RE2 GreenPower 1TB HDs
Test System and HD Tach Test Results
When testing the WD Caviar GP and RE2-GP terabyte SATA hard drives, we used an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13GHz) on an Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI motherboard. We also used 2GB of Corsair DDR2 (TWIN2X1024A-5400UL) and a 120GB Maxtor SATA hard drive as the main system drive. The 1TB WD Caviar GP and 1TB RE2-GP were compared to a 1TB Seagate Barracuda ES.2, 750GB Seagate 7200.10, a 750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16, a 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16, and a 74GB Western Digital Raptor.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13GHz) Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI nForce 650i SLI chipset Gigabyte 8800 GT 2048MB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-675MHz CAS 4 Integrated on board Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 1.5Gb/s Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS 1TB - N/A RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital RE2-GP WD1000FYPS 1TB - N/A RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS 500GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital Raptor 74GB 74GB - 10,000RPM - SATA 1.5Gb/s |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows Vista nForce Drivers v8.43 DirectX 10 NVIDIA ForceWare v169.25 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach 3.0.1.0 HD Tune 2.54 PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra XII SP1 |
We began our testing with Simpli Software's HD Tach, which is described on the company's web site as such: "HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible."
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Right off the bat, we are impressed by both of these GreenPower drives, especially considering their sub-7200 RPM spindle speeds. Thanks to big platters and some internal tweaking by WD, the Caviar GP and the RE2-GP put up Average Read and Average Write scores that are very respectable when compared to the 7200 RPM and 10k RPM drives listed in the charts. There must be some additional performance tweaks in the RE2-GP as it manages to edge out its Caviar cousin.
