PC Experts step in please
 

WD Green drive. I just bought 2 1.5tb for storage. I copied 162gb of rendered HD/SD video from drive C: 7200rpm to the new green drive. It took 28 minutes to complete. I think that is very darn good, don't you think?

I have read other people got the same green drive and took them 40 minutes to copy 20gb of data. I am wonder why mine green drive so fast? My PC is a stock dell i7 920 6gb od ddr3 set up triple channel. What are your thought?

If I've done the math right (before my morning coffee!), your data rate is just under 100MB/sec. I don't know what the drive is spec'ed at, but I'd think that is excellent system throughput and sustained write performance of the drive.

Among many factors, overall copy speed does depend on the mix of file sizes since the OS has to process and write FAT tables etc, so it may not be an apples-to-apples comparison...for a given amount of data, it takes longer to copy large number of small files than copying a single large file. But if someone is waiting 40 minutes for a 20GB copy from one internal disk to another, I think their system must have a significant bottleneck somewhere.

Thanks Pete for your input. So far, I like the green drive for storage. I copy The folder contained 162gb of video with 52 video files and the green drive performed well.

Did something similar yesterday ie: moved 320gb off a drive to a new 1.5tb wdBlack and my the transfer speed hovered around 100 or a little less Click the "details button on the dialogue box for realtime spped info)
My system is i7 6gb ddr3
Interesting that the green which costs a fair bit less than the black can achieve the same transfer speed.
It may be this business of 64mb cache and 2 processors on the caviar black is just marketing hype to achieve high benchmark scores and justify the inflated the price but in real world usage one can expect little differences other than the price. I'd love to buy the cheaper drive (more is always better when it comes to storage
I did note that the black has a 5 yr warantee and 3 yrs for the green
egg pricing in canda Dec5/2010 1.5tb black 109.00 and 1.5 green 89.00.

transfer speeds are certainly a big deal and we can't overlook longevity either

I agree with Bruce that some of the WD Greens perform pretty well - as storage or output drives. If I were to buy a Green or any other 5400 RPM-class drive, those two purposes are exactly what I would use them for.

For the record, the 2TB Black does achieve 140 MB/s on the outer tracks. The latest iteration of the 2TB Green achieves about 110 MB/s on the outer tracks - but that's because of its slower 5405 RPM spindle speed (versus 7200 RPM on the Black).

I pick up 2 1.5tb from Amazon for $59 each and I was able to pick up 1tb Seagate 7200rpm for $44 each.. Seagate seems to have a lot failures in hard drive but with that price I could not resist not to try it. The next day I could not $44 any where on Amazon. I should be getting it by Monday and will test it for speed.

my WD green 500's run faster than my older WD 500GB's too, by about 27MB/sec.