Western Digital WD20EADS

Here are the specs of the hard drive from WD’s website:

Performance Specifications

Transfer Rates
	Buffer To Host (Serial ATA)	3 Gb/s (Max)

Physical Specifications
	Formatted Capacity	2,000,398 MB
	Capacity	2 TB
	Interface	SATA 3 Gb/s
	User Sectors Per Drive	3,907,029,168

Physical Dimensions
English
	Height	1.028 Inches
	Length	5.787 Inches
	Width	4.00 Inches
	Weight	1.61 Pounds

Metric
	Height	26.1 mm
	Length	147 mm
	Width	101.6 mm
	Weight	0.73 kg

Environmental Specifications
Shock
	Operating Shock (Read)	65G, 2 ms
	Non-operating Shock	300G, 2 ms

Acoustics
	Idle Mode	25 dBA (average)
	Seek Mode 0	29 dBA (average)
	Seek Mode 3	26 dBA (average)

Vibration
	Operating
	Linear	20-300 Hz, .75G (0 to peak)
	Random	10-300 Hz, 0.008 g² / Hz

	Non-operating
	Low Frequency	5-20 Hz, 0.195 inches (double amplitude)
	High Frequency	20-500 Hz, 4.0G (0 to peak)

Electrical Specifications
Current Requirements
	Power Dissipation
	Read/Write	6.00 Watts
	Idle	3.70 Watts
	Standby	0.80 Watts
	Sleep	0.80 Watts

Because the numbers really didn’t change at all, we ran the test on the 640GB Hard drive that is also in the system. The numbers that the 640GB put out in High performance were significantly faster (12MS Range) then the numbers put out in Low noise mode (18msec range). We thus conclude that the setting is either not activated or does absolutely nothing on the WD20EADS. The drive already being slow, I see no reason why anybody would want to slow it down further.

Last but not least, we have ATTO:

Personal opinion:

This particular drive is relatively slow on seeks, but given its enormous size, this should be used mainly as a storage device, not a high speed hard drive. In this regard, this drive is relatively quick on sequential transfers, so large files won’t be that painful to transfer, regardless of the slower spindle speed this drive offers. One great advantage this drive has to offer is the fact that it is Very Very quiet while idling, and does not vibrate much at all. When seeking, it does make noise, like any other hard drive, but far less than most. This drive is truly a Green drive, which also means lower power consumption than most drives out there.

Here is the Changelog for HD Tune Pro for those interested:

What’s new in HD Tune Pro 4.01:

· Added option to monitor health status during tests
· Fixed display issue with high DPI font settings

What’s new in HD Tune Pro 4.00:

· Health (S.M.A.R.T) and temperature display support for external drives
· Support for drives larger than 2 TB
· Supports up to 32 drives
· Advanced S.M.A.R.T log functions
· Added short stroke testing
· Extra tests: quick read/write tests
· Added cache test
· More information is shown
· Benchmark tests can be run seperately
· Added option to perform the transfer rate test on the entire surface
· New command line parameters

What’s new in HD Tune Pro 3.50:

· Added Random Acces test
· Added option to perform quick Error Scan with command line parameters
· Minor improvements and bug fixes

Let me preface this review by saying that it’s hardly the first of its kind online. WD’s latest capacity monster was actually available on proverbial online store shelves back in February of 2009. So why are we reviewing it now you may ask? For one very simple reason: almost all preceding reviews were wrong. Say what?

HDTune 3.10 has actually has a little-known defect which affects latency measurements taken on drives larger than 1TB in size. The first thing that alerted us to the issue was that HDTune 3.10 Pro was reading it as a rather cool 14ms while most other utilities showed a more pedestrian pace of roughly 17ms. So which is the correct result?

Western digital’s Drive specs:

Test System:

• Processor: Intel Q9650 Overclocked to 3.6 GHz
• Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-UD3P With F9 Bios. (ICH10R Controller)
• Memory: 8GB OCZ Ram @ 800MHZ Dual Channel
• Power Supply: Corsair 650W TX650
• Graphics card 1: Asus Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX 512MB
• Graphics card 2: BFG Nvidia GeForce 8800GT OC 512MB
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

Here is a shot of what the drive looks like in windows:

Well here is a screenshot of the latency test on the old version of HDTune:

We then proceed to verify the findings with the very well known HDTach:

Off the bat, se see the discrepancy on the Random Access test already. We proceed to finding out more.

As it happens, we are now armed with HDTune 4.01 Pro and ready to rock and roll. Wow, you know you’re a geek when you get excited about seeing benches on a hard drive! With that cleared up, numbers time!

For those who are interested to use this drive as a quiet “high performance” drive, it is actually possible to short stroke this (by, for example, partitioning). There is actually a nice addition in the new version of HD Tune Pro which allows us to explore what happens when drives are short stroked. For this test we short stroke the drive to 1000GB:

So, we get a faster access time of 14.1MS Seem familiar? That is correct. It would seem that HD Tune Pro 3.10 would be testing the random access test up to only about 1000GB, making the results of the access time nearly identical to a short stroked 2tb drive at 1000GB.

We then proceed to finding out how many IOPs this can push out:

For those wondering if AAM can have an impact on this drive, we run the following test:

Here is with it set to High Performance:

And here it is with it set to Low Noise: