A new contender has arrived here at Nordic PC, the Western Digital 1.5TB Green Power hard drive, aka WD15EADS. After recent issues with Seagate's quality control, we were on the hunt for a new drive for very large storage environments. In the greater-than 1TB race, there are only two options, the Western Digital Green Power series and the Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 Barracuda.

Let's start with the quick compares between the GP and the Barracuda. Their costs are identical over at Newegg, $129.99, which equates to just 8.66 cents per gigabyte. The 1.5TB's big brother, the 2TB Green Power drive is $249.99, which equates to 12.5 cents per gigabyte, which is quite a bit more. This is why we're looking at the 1.5TB drive today. Even Seagate's 7200.12 1TB drive is more like 10 cents per gigabyte, so these drives are kings in cost per gigabyte.

The big question is how do they perform? WD's GP line is all about lowering your drive's power consumption, while the Barracuda is all about speed, so naturally I was worried that the GP would be a slug. However, in testing this was not the case. Just take a peak at this:

This was from when I unloaded my failing Barracuda over to the GP. I use my 1.5TB drive to keep Blu-Ray ISO's so that I can just double click them and watch them on my HTPC. It only took 37 of them to pretty much fill the thing up, since they are full resolution rips with all the menus and everything still in there. I was able to copy the entire drive in an afternoon, which is not bad at all. By the end of the copy, the speed had shrunk from ~80MB/s to ~69MB/s, but this is still really good performance for any type of drive.

How about the rest of the features? Green Power drives spin around 5400rpm or so, which means this is the coolest drive in the system. It's right next to a 150GB Raptor which is sitting at 38c right now. The GP drive is at 35c, while two older Seagate 7200.10's are at 38c and 40c. Most importantly, there are zero Read Errors, zero Seek Errors, and zero Reallocated Sectors on this drive after having almost all of it written to. I'm feeling pretty good about the stability of this drive at this point, much better than the Seagate that seems to rely on hardware ECC to protect your data.

I do want to address some of the poor ratings over at Newegg, because there is some serious FUD over there. With NVIDIA chipsets and Windows XP, in some cases, 1.5TB drives cannot be formatted properly. They will just hang at 73% and never finish. This can be resolved by downloading the latest drivers from NVIDIA. Pick them up from our drivers page.

Also, and very importantly, this drive is not for RAID systems. To keep with the low-power design, Western Digital chose to automatically park the drive heads at times, which some RAID systems will see as a hard drive failure. So you could be in a constant RAID rebuild if the drives are mirrored, or if the drives are in RAID-5 for parity, you could lose all of your data. WD has acknowledged this, and released the RE4-GP 2TB hard drive for users who need big RAID arrays. They are really pricey though, so you may want to stick with a 1TB Caviar Black for your RAID solutions.

In wrapping this up, I have nothing but good things to say about this drive. The cost is about as low as you can get per gigabyte. The performance is really good when dealing with large files, which is what this drive should be doing. Google has recommended to keep your hard drives cool to keep them functional in their white paper on hard drive failures, and this GP drive does that better than any other drive in my system. That white paper is actually a great read if you have the time, and you can get it right here in PDF.