Mini Review - WD Caviar GP (Green Power) 1TB HDD
The GP line from Western Digital was introuduced last year. Due to the slightly higher cost compare to the flagship Caviar SE or the higher-end SE16. Also, the lack of availability makes this model less viable for me to recommend to customers. Most of the time, I just use Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 because of the significant cost savings.
GP is short for Green Power, WD introduced it as the market demands more energy efficient components. Since there aren't a lot of 1TB disk in the market, and the GP has the best price among all disks.
What makes the GP different is the way the HDD is designed. Pretty much all HDD today has a 7200RPM spindle. The GP has a variable speed spindle depend on load. This yield to a quieter, cooler running HDD. Other features on the HDD remain the same like other HDD, such as 16MB cache buffer, NCQ, 3.0Gb/s transfer speed. Without the green label, it's hard to notice this disk.
Upon installing to the iMac and turning it on, suddenly the iMac seems to be very quiet. Installing Leopard on it takes roughly about 1 hr and 20 min; very comparable to the WD Caviar SE that is on the original iMac. During the seeking and loading, the disk is fairly quiet. Since the original Caviar SE is a quiet disk, the GP just feels like silent.
Since I am a big fan of the Cavair SE 16, I just want to see how well this GP stack up against it. The first thing I did was installing Parallels Desktop and XP. Mac people will know Parallels will create a disk image for the PC, rather than a partition. This little test will show how well the disk handles a large single file.
Installing and running XP on Parallels is just very disappointing. The speed on Parallels is quite fast, just the disk reads slow. Installing XP takes a little over 50 min compare to 40-45 min on standard system. Installing Windows Update and application is slow.
Playing the HDD in the Mac enviroment seems identical to other Macs. I guess the file chuck on the Mac are little smaller than say a PC file.
Checking the temp on the HDD during Parallels is about 40C, it is a few degrees cooler than the Caviar SE.
Compare to a high-end or mainstream WD Caviar, the GP is slow. Seek time however is close to identical. The slower spindle speed results in a slightly lower sustained transfer speed on large files. The overall performance feels like a HDD with a 5400 RPM spindle.
WD advertised the GP consume less than 5W of power on idle, which I would say is pretty impressive compare to other disks.
There are some in-depth review on the GP, Seagate 7200.11, WD RE and Caviar SE16 on techspot. Those who are interested in benchmarking can have a look there.
If you are building a "green" and quiet PC. The WD GP HDD is a good choice. Couple with 80Plus certified PSU and EnergyStar certified motherboard, you can save a few hundred dollars on power each year.
Philip |
發表於 2008-4-19 23:13
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