Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS | 
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| Brand: Western Digital
Category: CE
List Price: $159.99
Buy New: $109.99
You Save: $50.00 (31%)
(as of 9/9/10 05:21 PDT - Details)
New (27) Used (1) from $102.95
Rating:  63 reviews
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Number Of Items: 1
Batteries Included: No
Hard Drive Size: 1000
Size: 2 TB
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 5.8 x 4 x 1
Legal Disclaimer: We do not in any way represent that any part we sell is legal to possess in your jurisdiction. Check with you local authorities to ensure it is legal for you to possess before buying!
Warranty: 3 years warranty
MPN: WD20EARS
Model: WD20EARS
UPC: 718037748757
EAN: 5051964752561
ASIN: B002ZCXK0I
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Features:
| • | WD Caviar Green hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% | | • | A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings | | • | IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration. | | • | 2TB capacity holds up to 400,000 digital photos, 500,000 MP3 files, and 240 hours of HD video. | | • | 3 year limited warranty. |
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Product Description
WD Advanced Format technology increases media format efficiency, thus enabling larger drive capacities. WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. WD Advanced Format drives work with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP but require the use of the free WD Align software available on www.wdc.com/advformat.
Available in capacities up to 2 TB, WD Caviar® GreenTM SATA hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% and offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature. Based on WD's exclusive GreenPowerTM technology, these drives are designed to deliver power savings as the primary attribute. As hard drive capacities increase, the power required to run those drives increases as well. WD Caviar Green drives make it possible for energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. They are ideal for PCs, external storage and other devices that require lower power consumption and cool, quiet operation.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 63
 Buy this drive May 17, 2010
J. Vaughn
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
I've bought six of these. They are quiet. After many hours, they are barely warm to the touch. Every other hard-disk drive made can be used as a space heater.
They are a bit slower, adding about 33% to the seek time, but nothing noticeable to data reads. This only matters when reading lots of small files like during boot-up. I use an Intel SSD for my main drive and one of these for data. It is the best of both worlds.
I've found that most computers recognize these drives but must be told to mount them, format them, and assign them a drive letter. (This only needs to be done once.) This is a problem with large drives, not with these specifically. For true ease of setup, get a 1TB drive.
My 4th Caviar Green HDD April 29, 2010
Michael D. Newcomer (Xenia, OH United States)
18 out of 20 found this review helpful
I bought this drive for the 4th bay on my Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array DR04DD10 which is attached to a 24" iMac. I have the other three bays filled with Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EADS and have had them about a year and they've worked perfectly. They run very cool and quiet (you have to put your ear right against Drobo to hear them) resulting in Drobo's fan hardly ever having to kick on. The fan on Drobo is louder than the drives.
Note to Drobo Owners: You will need to update your firmware for Drobo to version 1.3.6 if you haven't already. The new update supports the new 4kb sectors (advanced format). And you must update Drobo dashboard FIRST to version 1.6.8 before updating the firmware.
I am a photographer shooting with and Canon EOS 5D Mark II which creates giant files right out of the camera (20-25MB each), so the space is nice. Since I am using it primarily for storage, speed isn't a big concern. People who really need speed should check out Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD2001FASS but it comes at a much higher price point.
The packaging was excellent. A large outer box, and inside was a smaller box surrounded by air pillows. Opening the smaller box you find the drive suspended by two feet cushions. All 4 of the drives I've ordered from Amazon have come this way and I really appreciate it Maybe I'm just lucky. It's too early to tell how long the drive will last. Having a 3 year warranty from Western Digital help with peace of mind. Once it's time to expand Drobo again, I'll will be buying another Caviar Green but by then we'll be up to 4TB drives.
For you EE propeller heads out there, here is some electrical data August 4, 2010
EEhead (Bay Area, CA USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I have bought a LOT of the 2TB WD Caviar drives. I have had excellent results with them on my iMac. I use them primarily for data storage where fast data retrieval is not a consideration. I'm more concerned with plugging them into these USB-based drive docks when I need the data. However, I'm also interested in them from an electrical perspective, just because ... well, just because I'm interested in them. Over the years I have worked my way up the ladder of hard drive storage capacities. Like many of you, I've been rather appalled at how hot these older models would get. I swear, you could fry an egg on some of them. I never felt comfortable with their longevity, fearing that they would most likely burn themselves up. Fortunately, none did.
When the Caviar Green product line came out (1TB was when I first took notice), I was quite intrigued at the claimed power reduction. In electronics, heat is the main enemy of components. Usually every 10 degree C rise in temperature translates into a halving of component life. The Caviar brand looked like a way to get a much more reliable drive if the power reduction numbers actually panned out.
I took one of the drives in to work where I have fancy test gear at my disposal. In particular, I have some very good Tektronix current probes that let me measure DC and AC currents. I built a little cable that let me get to the +12V and +5V lines so that I could clamp my current probes around the wires to measure current consumption. I connected the two power leads to power supplies so that I could also vary the two voltages. In this fashion, I can accurately see and measure power consumption of the drive as I exercise the drive. I get far more accurate measurements this way than you can with a simple watt-meter, which seldom let you see fractional watts.
Since I can't (actually, don't know how to) embed scope photos in this review, all I can do is verbally describe my observations. My tests are far from extensive, but they will give you a good idea of how much power these drives draw, and when they draw it.
* When the drive is just sitting there, doing nothing but spinning, the +12V current drain is 0.24A and the +5V drain is 0.13A. That totals 4.2 watts of power during idle. I have not measured earlier, high-power drives, but I'm willing to bet the Caviar Greens draw at most half the power of traditional hard drives. I would not be surprised if it were 1/3 the power.
* If you shut off one voltage, the other supply stops drawing all power. It's a convenient way to power the drives on and off. I would suggest power cycling the +5V rail as the circuitry to shut off the +5V supply with a simple PFET is simpler than that for the +12V rail.
* When the drives are first powered up, +5V draws an almost constant 500-600 mA. +12V current is a ramp, starting at 200 mA and works its way up to 600 mA after about 10 seconds, when the drive is then up to speed. At this point, the +12V peak current drops down to idle spinning) current of 0.24A. It does not vary much after this, regardless of disk activity (erase, write, read, etc.). On the other hand, the +5V supply current gets busy. It's pretty clear that the head servo is driven from the +5V supply and not the +12V supply. It's hard to verbally describe the +5V current, but I would say the average current during head movement activity is about 400 mA. When there is no activity, the +5V current is about 0.13A. When the drive is done doing what it is doing, then it drops into the 4.2W idle power mode that I mentioned above. If you are a power supply designer, you should be aware that these DC currents I cite are averages, and that you have a "hash" of AC currents that result in the average values I list. The +5V current has a hash of about 300mA p-p, and the +12V current hash is maybe 400mA p-p.
* I have never succeeded in getting OSX to put the drives to sleep. I've tried all the utilities in the Mac universe (SpinDown, Cocktail), but no matter what you do, the drives never want to got to sleep, at least for me. If WD puts out a utility for the PC, they certainly offer no support for OSX. Even if you properly eject the drives from the desktop, they sit there spinning and drawing 4.2W. Hardly seems "fully green" to me.
* During the idle mode, my infrared thermometer measures a case temperature rise of 12 degrees C, which is a pretty low number. UL safety limits for human hand touch temperatures are usually between 50-55 degree C -- you'll begin to pull your hand back at that temperature range. So if the drive is 12 degrees above ambient, and you are sitting at normal room temperatures (25 degrees), then your drive temperature is only about 37 degrees (98.6 degrees F, just like a human!). This explains why people are reporting that the drive "feels pretty cool." As these things go, they do indeed run quite cool.
Here's hoping that some of you more technically-inclined customers out there find this data useful.
Best 2TB Drive on the Market!!!!! March 24, 2010
John J. Christie (OC)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have done so shopping around to add an additional HDD to my computer. I keep 3 things in mind when looking for a new HDD, 1)Price, 2)Speed and 3)Noise. I didn't to pay and arm and aleg for a 2TB HDD, but i also wanted to make sure that it was fast and quiet. And let me tell you, this drive has delivered in every way across the board. I took minutes to install. I'm running Windows 7 Pro 64bit, so this new drive wasn't an issue. Once Windows was back up and running, it foind the drive and it was done installing and formatting in seconds. I will primarily use this drive of media (pictures, music and videos) The videos stream off the HDD flawlessly. I would highly recommend this drive, especially now that all future drive will be 4K sectors.
Mac OS X April 24, 2010
Yachtsman
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Using a startech external usb drive bay the disk worked straight from the box. With OSx you will be asked to initialize the disk, after replying yes disk utility is automatically started, select the number of partitions and names that you want and about 2 minutes later the disk is available for use. The disk is clearly much faster than USB 2 and seems to run about 5c cooler than a WD 500gb disk that I also have in the external bay.
Much to early to comment on reliability yet but these oem drives are usually fairly well sorted out.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 63
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