Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS uses in the new technology Advanced Format. Advanced format increases the sector size - the smallest physical storage unit of a ferromagnetic mass storage device - from 512 to 4096 bytes. This allows the hard drive manufacturer to store more data per area - the immediate benefit is low for you. In addition, sector size, Advanced format because of the change on some systems, especially Windows , XP, lead to performance degradation when you are not utility WD Align utility from Western Digital use.

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The Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS was due to the reduced rotation speed of 6,000 revolutions per minute only satisfactory access times. The data rates of the 2-terabyte drive on the other hand were good. A DVD movie with a size of 4.2 GB settled in about 40 seconds to read or write. And for 1,000 MP3 files (5 GB) needed the WD20EARS also barely a half minutes. Also good were the sequential data rates: On average, the model reached Cavier Green's reading 95 and writing 89 MB / s.

The strengths of Caviar Green WD20EARS lie in their environmental characteristics. With just under 4 watts at idle which is one hard disk to the most economical 2-terabyte drives in the test. But even under load reined the WD20EARS their current hunger to nearly 7 watts - as some 1000-GB hard disk can not compare with it. Volume was also very positive on the Caviar Green: with 0.1 Sone at rest and under load, 0.3 Sone, the drive worked virtually inaudible.