Power efficient, quiet, and reliable, the Caviar Green is like the Prius of hard drives.

Sometimes when you build a system, you want to get the absolute fastest hard drive you can, and you do not care about storage space, power efficiency, or noise. It's sort of like when you are in your twenties and you have a hot rod with a loud exhaust. There are times when it is all about speed. This is the sort of time where you get yourself a Raptor or VelociRaptor hard drive.

On the other hand, sometimes you want to run a platter based hard drive as quiet as possible, for example in a recording studio, or you want to run a data center full of them without consuming as much power as a small city and being forced to wear earplugs near them. For these sorts of situations, you want to get yourself a Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive... or twenty.

For the Drobo in the Ultimate Gaming machine and for all of our NASes here at TWiT, these are our drives of choice. We use cheaper Hitachi drives typically for recording our shows on the Tricaster now, as they are only one drive and only used for a short period of time and then removed from the cradle and put in storage, but for drives that are used in multiples and are on constantly, we are now using Caviar Greens as a policy.