Best 3TB Internal Hard Drive – Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Review

If you’re one of those enthusiast who always in needs of huge disk space for your treasured files, the Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green is perfect for your massive storage requirements. Recently the 2TB was released and become the biggest drive available on the market. Due to the increasing demands for large storage, Western Digital breaks the 2TB mark and introduced the first 3TB internal hard drive.

What Is It In The WD 3TB Caviar Green Hard Drive?

The Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green runs at 5,400rpm with SATA II 3GB/s interface. It uses the same 4 platters just like their previous 2TB drives, but this time it has 750GB each. This drive is quiet; it doesn’t produce that loud annoying sound. The noise level is only at 24dB at idle and a maximum of 29dB during read/write operations.

It consumes relatively less power which is good for energy savvy, 5.5W at idle, only 6W during read/write operations and 0.8W for sleep/standby. This drive is also cool; the temp ranges from 5 to 60 Degrees Celsius. With all of these features, comes the idea behind a green hard drive.

The Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green is not a fast drive, not a hungry for speed stuff but rather a perfect backup storage. This drive is excellent for office and HTPC applications, also great for external drive. It is best when combined with the super fast SSD as your boot drive and the Caviar Green would be your secondary drive. Another perfect application for this drive is for Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Issues With 3TB Hard Drives

There are issues regarding hard drives with more than 2TB, the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB is no exemption to that. This issues concerns in the older OS versions, older system using Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table doesn’t support these especially the 32-bit. Because, 2^32 gives up only 2,199,023,255,252 bytes or equivalent to 2.19TB, this is the maximum addressable on the disk.

To resolve these issues, Western Digital hard drives with more than 2TB provide an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA). This will help the OS to use drivers with support of larger drives. This is in the form of PCI-E 2.0 1x adapter card with SATA III controller.

With this huge disk space, Western Digital move out from 512byte to 4Kb (4096 to be exact) sector size. The old 512byte is being use by a long time traditional MBR and the new one they called Advanced Format (AF) technology. The AF is not compatible with Windows XP and older version OS. Windows Vista and windows 7 users can take full advantage on the HBA to properly recognize the 3TB drive.

On the other hand, Apple OSX fully supports those drives with more than 2TB without the need of the HBA. However, if you’re using a newer version of motherboards with GUID Partition Table (GPT) or UEFI BIOS support system, you don’t need this adapter card, because they are design to accommodate these huge hard drives. If you want to use it as a primary boot disk, you’ll need a 64-bit version of windows OS.

Customers Review

The Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green earns a high rating of 4.5/5 stars. Here is one excerpt from customers review for this drive,

100% Great drive By DeP (Chicagoland, USA), April 24, 2011

“If you need a 3TB internal HDD for storage or for use in a NAS/RAID array for backup and storage this is the drive for you!
Fast*, quiet, very cool, and rock solid in my use with a Synology NAS.
*NOTE: This drive is never intended to be a ‘boot’ drive from which you boot up your OS. Will it work? Sure. Will it be rocket fast? No! This drive is for STORAGE not OS.
All in all an amazing drive and who would have ever thought you could get 3TB of storage for this price!!” >>Click here to read the full review.

Conclusion

The WD 3TB Caviar Green is design for low power, low noise, less heat and above all huge capacity drive. These categories are what they excel most. They can’t compete against the newer 7,200rpm but a lot faster than the 5,400rpm competitors. This drive is perfect for data hungry enthusiast that serves as your secondary drive, but not as a primary boot disk. Combining it with the super fast SSD for your OS and the Caviar Green 3TB as your backup, this will make it a powerful duo.

A big improvement over the previous 2TB version, I think it is due to its larger capacity per disk platter. A 750GB each platter for the 3TB, in contrast with only 500GB for 2TB is what makes the difference. It means that, a more dense platter have less traveling time for the heads to read/write the data’s, therefore a faster access time is expected.

The inclusion of the 2 port SATA PCI-E card for the HBA is a big plus, in this case, no need to worry if you’re using an older board to support this drive. The price point for this drive is within the reach but, far behind compare with the 2TB version. I guess their trying to justify its latest breakthrough in putting up this huge drive. At least they lowering it now since the day of its released, this is good news for consumers, as it becoming more competitive with other brands.

Overall, this is a great drive and very dependable as we already know the Western Digital’s reputations in this industry. Cool, quiet, energy saver, efficient and high capacity, all the advantage in a single solid performing drive. This is what the Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green drive is all about. Click Here to get it at its Lowest Price!