Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB and My Book Essential 3TB Drives Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 19, 2010 1:43 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- HDDs
- Western Digital
- 3TB
Final Words
At $239 for an internal drive, the 3TB offering isn't too expensive. You can shave off another penny or two per GB if you go with a smaller drive, but if you want the space of a single drive Western Digital's offering isn't a bad deal. You have to go into this purchase with the right expectations however.
The performance difference between the 3TB Caviar Green and a modern 7200RPM drive can be significant depending on your workload. We saw WD's 3TB drive perform a lot like a notebook hard drive depending on the workload. If all you're using it for is to store large files, photos, videos, etc... then you'll be fine. But I wouldn't recommend using it as a boot/application drive, the random performance and even light workload performance just doesn't measure up.
The 3TB drive (or a pair of them in RAID 1) would be a great companion to an SSD for all of your mass storage needs. As SSDs grow in size and popularity, I'm not sure we'll need to have 7200RPM hard drives in desktops any longer. These sub-6K RPM drives may be enough to get the job done. Sequential read/write speed is within 10% of Seagate's 2TB 7200RPM Barracuda XT, and I suspect that's all you need if you have a very fast SSD for your OS and applications.
As far as the external drive goes. Kudos to Western Digital for a well executed chassis, however I am concerned about the somewhat erratic read/write performance I noted in my testing of the drive.
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krumme - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Can we perhaps see this in a My Book World Edition?Thanx for the fine HD reviews Anand
ervinshiznit - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
So with the 32 bit LBA restriction, does this mean that its possible to boot from a partition on a 3TB drive as long as that partition is no larger than 2.1TB?davepermen - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
And it's especially nice that the old small 2TB drives are now really cheap. Put a new one to celebrate into my windows home server. The 3TB ones won't be supported for whs1 anyways, so it's cheap 2TB drives from now on.Then, when the 3TB will be in the same price/gb ratio, the next disk will be needed, and whs2 will be there, supporting them.
And yes, storage (in my case, networked storage thanks to whs) + ssd in the systems is definitely the best setup. 100% agreed.
ratbert1 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
"The controller supports booting to a 3TB formatted drive if your motherboard has EFI support."The chart shows support for boot with 64 bit Vista and 7 with the HBA controller. If you have 32 bit, you can use it as a data drive.
SteelCity1981 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
It's totally pointless to make 6gb platter hard drives. At least WD understands that.Taft12 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Nobody makes 6GB/platter drives... at least not since 1999!SteelCity1981 - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
I'm talking speed not size duh.Roland00Address - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Western Digital Caviar Black WD6402AAEX 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
Western Digital VelociRaptor WD4500HLHX 450GB 10000 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
Western Digital VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX 600GB 10000 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
bennyg - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
If you were uninformed, you would think a SATA 6GBPS 3TB HDD is faster than a SATA 3GBPS 3TB HDD. So marketing people think it's very useful.ytoledano1 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
In most cases, data is lost due to user error, virus, theft or fire - RAID1 protects against none of these. RAID1 will protect you against disk failure, but its main advantage is in mission-critical servers where you don't want to reboot the machine when replacing a drive. How many desktop users need this feature?Worst, people might think that their data is backed up 'cause their disk is redundant. It's not.