Best in-class thermal and power consumption, but slower than competition.

As an advanced technical user, I want to write a review to point a few things out and help everyone interested in WD's Caviar Green line get a better idea of what they should buy.

The review written by babates2012-us contains a lot of misinformation that I will first like to address. I think what he meant to say was he didn't understand why the drive is made up of four 500GB (which he mistyped as 500MB) platters rather than one huge 2TB platter. First off, that in itself is incorrect - the WD20EARX uses three 667GB platters, rather than four 500GB platters. Secondly, the reason for multiple platters is because no 2TB platters exist. In fact, 1TB platters don't even exist yet. So to give this product a 3-star just because you don't have sufficient knowledge of hard drive facts is very unfair.

That being said, the WD20EARX is in some ways inferior to its predecessor, the WD20EARS. The WD20EARS comes in two flavors, those with the suffix 00J2GB0 and those with 00MVWB0. WD20EARS-00J2GB0 is the older model that uses four 500GB platters, while the newer WD20EARS-00MVWB0 uses three 667GB platters just like WD20EARX. The only advantage WD20EARX has over the WD20EARS-00MVWB0 is the SATA III interface, which supports up to 6.0Gbps, but that in itself is a bit misleading because a typical mechanical hard drive isn't fast enough to saturate the bandwidth of a SATA II port. So you won't be gaining any performance from the SATA III interface. Furthermore, WD20EARX actually performs a bit slower than the WD20EARS-00MVWB0 due to slightly slower spindle speed (I think a review mentioned 5200rpm rather than 5400).

If you want the best performance out of a WD "Green" drive, go with the WD20EARS-00MVWB0. Buy the WD20EARX only if you want the manufacturer's warranty (pay attention to the manufacturing date in this case! WD only covers this drive for 2 years - so make sure you ask the seller beforehand for the manufacture date).

Lastly, while WD's "Caviar Green" series does have the lowest power consumption and temperature compared to "Green" offerings from Samsung and Seagate, it is also the slowest in terms of performance due to its tendency to park the drive head whenever possible (I think 9 seconds after idle). This hurts the drive's access time. Just a little FYI for those looking for Green drives.

Great drive, great price

This hard drive is very affordable for the amount of storage it provides. I've purchased these in the past and I have never had a single one fail yet. While they are "Green" drives, they appear to work fast enough for most storage applications, but I would never recommend making a green drive a boot disk for any system. These are mostly targeted towards storage, and not speed, which is all I have ever needed/used them for. Overall great drive at a great price!

great value for the money

- Large space 2tb
- Quite advantageous price
- Acceptable reading speed and Recording;
ps: The Caviar Green range is designed to save power, so has a lower spindle speed of just 5,400rpm, compared to the normal 7,200rpm of a normal desktop disk. Western Digital has implemented caching algorithms designed to mitigate the performance reduction that results from this.
In our large file transfer tests, the disk's performance was in line with its full-speed rivals, averaging 139.8MB/s based on a write speed of 133.1MB/s and a read speed of 146.4MB/s. However, its slow spin speed makes an impact on its performance in small file transfers. Here, it averages just 47.1MB/s with a slow write speed of 37.6MB/s and a read speed of 56.6MB/s. That makes it better suited to being used as a data disk than as a system disk.

Could have been just one large hard drive instead of 4 smaller ones

I believe this item is a great value for the money, but considering the formatting procedure that is more complex than Hard Drives of smaller size i would only use it for storage and i would have my data backed up to another hd or as an image file to another hd.
that and the fact that it has individual sectors of 500 MB each to form the 2 TB Size i do not understand why it could not be just 1 large hard drive.

EARX are some of the best drives for the money!

These drives are one of the better WD drives. However they are no longer making them. 7200 RPM in the Green Era are not so go from other companies but WD made these right. Fast data transfer and cheap. Great for RAID storage and media servers.