2 TB Hard Disk Drive Battle: Seagate Barracuda LP vs. Western Digital Caviar Green

Introduction

So far only two 2 TB hard disk drives have reached the market and both are “green” models, meaning they rotate at lower speeds in order to save energy. Models spinning at 7,200 rpm will reach the market only by the end of the year (it is more complicated to build a 7,200 rpm 2 TB drive than a 5,400 rpm one) and they will be faster than these two models we are reviewing today. Let’s compare the performance of Seagate Barracuda LP with Western Digital Caviar Green.

Seagate Barracuda LP spins at 5,900 rpm, while Western Digital does not disclosure the rotational speed from Caviar Green (5,400 rpm is our educated guess). Hard drives typically consume between 8-10 W; “green” models like the two we are going to compare consume practically half of this.

Both 2 TB models we tested have a real capacity of 1.82 TB or 1,863 GB (3,907,029,168 sectors). As you may be aware, the capacity advertised by hard disk drive manufacturers isn’t the real drive capacity. Read our Hard Disk Drives Capacity Limits tutorial for further information on this subject.

Here is a summary of the two hard drives we are going to compare:

Prices were reasearched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review.

Now let’s see which drive is the fastest 2 TB product.