Customer Reviews

Western Digital Caviar 3TB SATA 6 GB/s 64MB Cache 3.5 inch OEM Internal Hard Drive Green

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a 'new' advanced format hard drive that is designed [optimised] for 64-bit Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS X [Leopard 10.5, Snow Leopard 10.6, but Boot Camp not supported]. Most Western Digital Advanced Format Drives can be used with XP if you put a hard drive jumper across pins 7/8 before formatting and partitioning [if you fail to do that or have multiple partitions under XP, you will have to use WDs 'Align utility' as well]. You also might occasionally get problems installing these 3 Gb/s SATA hard drives on 1.5 Gb/s SATA motherboards [shorting pin 5/6 rectifies this].

However generally, if XP, Vista or Windows 7 is installed as the 32-bit version on your PC, it will not be able to format or recognise the full capacity of a 3Tb hard drive, either as an internal drive or as an external USB2 one. This is due to the 2.19 Tb limit with 32-bit operating systems. However owing to a hardware fix, this 3Tb drive can be used as a secondary drive with 32-bit Vista & Windows 7 [not XP] systems provided you use the PCI express [PCIe 1x] HighPoint RocketRAID 62X Serial ATA card, that Western Digital are supplying with this hard drive [the hard drive must be attached directly to this PCIe card]. This SATA PCIe card is sometimes called a 'host bus adaptor'[HBA card]. Also 32-bit and 64-bit OS's (including XP) can recognise this 3Tb drive if it's connected as an external drive via USB2 provided there is a special SATA-to-USB bridge chip inside the enclosure that takes care of these addressing issues, so to be safe I'd only buy this 3Tb drive within the Western Digital My Book Essential USB2/3 enclosure or get the Seagate 3Tb equivalent. I guess the drive would a bit slow via an external USB2 enclosure if you used it for large file transfers. However, this 3Tb drive will work fine as is (no HBA card needed), with any of the above OS (32 or 64 bit), if the drive is installed as a NAS network drive.

Also bad news if you want to use this 3Tb Green Caviar as the primary boot drive, you'll need 64-bit Windows Vista/7 AND a motherboard with a Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) BIOS. Motherboards equipped with UEFI BIOSes are only just becoming mainstream. Motherboards that lack UEFI BIOSes will not be able to boot off the drive, even if it's connected to the HighPoint HBA card (you won't ever be able to boot from this drive with 32-bit Windows or 64-bit XP). Fortunately if you use this 3Tb drive as a secondary storage drive and boot from another smaller one, a UEFI BIOS is not required, although you must check whether your motherboard BIOS & SATA supports 3Tb & GPT formatting for 64-bit Windows Vista/7 otherwise you may need the HBA card again (XP won't work at all, that's external USB or NAS only). This hard drive is listed as an OEM version of the 3Tb Green drive suggesting it might come as just the hard drive, without the HighPoint PCIe card, screws or a SATA cable - to ensure you get the PCIe HBA boot card, check with the Amazon reseller listing or the supplier that it's included. WD were only shipped this drive with the HBA card, as it may be useless without it, but check that's still the case. Relatively new non-UEFI motherboards may support this 3Tb drive directly as secondary SATA storage, for example my ASUS P5P43TD Pro (from ~2010) recognised this 3Tb drive via it's external eSATA port and after setting it to GPT and formatting it in Windows 7 64-bit I got 2.7Gb of useable storage without needing the HBA card. Seagate support a translational software fix to enable their 3Tb drive to work i.e. Seagate DiscWizard Software, but I don't know if I'd trust a software patch for crucial data and WD don't support one.

Complicated, well yes [even I'm not sure I've got it all right], and worst still there are apparently serious issues with some PC hardware even when using the PCIe HBA card and 64-bit Windows 7, so it might well be worth holding off using this hard drive internally until you get a motherboard with UEFI BIOS or know your old motherboard's SATA hardware & BIOS can support it. These 3Tb/2.5Tb Green drives are really more for adventurous types unless used as a 'My Book Essential' external USB2/3 or for network NAS storage [where it should always work fine - and that's how I often use the drive, for secondary storage and overnight backup at work].

So, what's the hard drive like to use? Well apparently the 4Kb sector/head parking hardware problems early WD Green drives had have now been resolved. This 3Tb drive comes with a large 64Mb cache, to speed up the inherent slowness of the drive resulting from its laudable green low power ambitions [5,400 spin speed and low power/noise operation]. Essentially this new 3Tb hard drive reads 10Mb/s faster than the 2Tb Green, and is in the middle of pack regarding reading files [beating some 7,200 rpm drives]. Unfortunately it is a little lethargic at writing files, enough to make it less desirable as a system boot drive - no problem really, get a noisier 7,200 rpm 1Tb WD Black drive or perhaps an SSD for that. This 3Tb drive is however perfect as a secondary hard drive, so for its Green credentials, quiet efficient operation, and massive storage capacity: 4*. That said, as I write you could buy two Western Digital 2Tb Green drives for similar money per Tb - and these 2Tb drives have no complicated issues with 32-bit OS/UEFI BIOSes and HBA PCIe cards. WD Green drives only have a 2 year warranty though (was 3 years), compared to the faster WD Black's 5 year one. There's also the WD Red drives for 24/7 server & Raid use. Warranty returns are really easy via Western Digital, although that only covers a new hard drive not lost data.

Note that around 6% of all new hard drives fail in the first year after manufacture, and it's not a case of if, but when a hard drives fails, so don't trust all your crucial data to one new hard drive - or to one PC [lightning strikes can wipe out all the internal/external hard drives in one go or if the PCs stolen all the hard drives are likely to go with it].

I have bought WD drives previously and have been happy with their reliability and performance. Whilst it is early days, so far I have not been disappointed with the pair of these which I purchased. I have experienced no issues as a direct result of the drives and the unit is keeping them working well.

On this occasion I have bought a pair of these 3TB drives to work in a dual drive NAS drive unit. A little over the top for the performance, but the price was very good and slightly better than the 3 GB/s option at the time. For the past few days I've been copying content to them, whilst also streaming some content from them. In preparation for these drives, I had updated the firmware on the NAS drive unit so that it can support 3TB drives before installation. You may also wish to confirm that you are using the latest firmware/BIOS/SATA drivers for you system as some older systems may have issues with the larger capacity these drives offer.

As with all SATA drives, it was a simple case of plugging them in, initialising, partitioning and formatting them. They were ready to use within an hour of arrival, but I know that formatting them for use on a PC would have taken a lot longer using the standard method (i.e. not quick format).

I have set them up using a RAID 0 configuration. This should ensure faultless HD Video streaming over my LAN, which will be their primary use. Whilst this configuration offers no data redundancy, the data isn't highly valuable. Any loss would be an inconvenience though. The unit does offer other RAID options which would support automatic data backup.

I intend to get a larger unit at a later date and would happily use these (or similar drives) if all works well in the mean time. In my case such a larger unit will make use of a better RAID system, meaning that there should be less chance of data loss. I already have my eyes on such a unit, but I will need to save up some money for everything first.

For reference, the NAS drive unit I am using is the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 (Diskless) RNDU2000.

i find western digital the best,for long term reliability. i.m still running my old 320gb western digital ide not serial.i personally would not buy anything else.this 3tb is no exception,it's a lovely drive with quick access oviously not as quick as solid state but when a 250 gb solid state cost around £500 i don't think anyone can complain.i would always recomend western digital to any of my friends.

i have had Western Digital My Book drives for what seems forever now & fearing they MIGHT start playing up & loose data in the process i decided to buy the superlative NewerTech Guardian Maximus Raid1 FW800 enclosure without drives & ordered 2 of these here to install in it
unfortunately one was DOA but immediately after i contacted Avides/sent the defective back, i got a new one, inserted it in my FW800 Raid 1 enclosure & the NewerTech copied everything to the new drive &....life is good again !
they are quiet, they take loads of stuff & all things being equal + a little luck , i'm sure they will keep on going on strong for a long time

excellent sata 3tb drive. very competatively priced works very well in my hot-swap docking station and is very quiet would recomment to anyone

Surprisingly, I had not purchased a WD bare drive for a number of years, despite once using nothing else. I had originally searched for a different brand, one that I have strongly adhered to for some time, but their products seem to be in strictly limited supply, and I could find no-one with any stock. In fact, some supplier of similar drives stated that they were in such limited supply that numbers would be rationed to a single unit per customer.

I originally ordered a pair of these from a UK supplier for use in a RAID enclosure. Although they first appeared to have the stock, they did not. I reordered at a slightly higher price from another supplier only to find after the fact that the drives would be shipped from Germany and a 3-week delivery spread was given which gave me quite a nasty shock. Goods actually arrived within 7 days, protectively wrapped and packed to perfection, if not to excess.

Potential buyers may be unnecessarily swayed by the comments in some reviews about 3TB HDDs not being 32-bit OS-friendly. The reason is that 32-bit systems cannot see partitions larger than a full 2TB (2048MB) due to their use of NTFS, a little larger than a notional 2TB drive will provide. It therefore means that about 750GB of the drive's capacity will not be accessible. You cannot even partition it as a second 'drive' with NTFS. With a 64-bit system and HDDs larger than 2TB, another partitioning system, GPT - GUID Partition Table - becomes available. That allows much larger partitions and the full capacity becomes available. You can, if you wish, create an extended series of smaller partitions on the one drive rather than having a limit of four. As most recent PCs and laptops are provided with 64-bit systems, the larger drives becoming available are usable with those machines.

The drives appear completely silent in use and partitioning and formatting were surprisingly near-immediate using Window's Disk Management tool. As one of the functions of Green HDDs is to reduce their power usage, they do this partly by varying between 7200 and 5400rpm spin speeds, the faster speeds used for prolonged reading/writing, and also by powering down the spin motor if the drive is unused for some time - typically about 10 minutes. However, this 'green' function can cause problems in some systems as the function is not BIOS-supported, in which event you may be better served with a standard HDD.

At about 60% more in price than a similar 1TB unit (not Green), they are therefore good value, and not significantly more expensive than 2TB.

If to be used as a solitary drive, I would suggest using a good enclosure, perhaps one with fan cooling or with ventilation. As the drive can spin at 7200 rpm, there will be more heat produced than from a 5400 rpm alternative.

In my case, I had ordered a pair to use in a RAID enclosure using mode 1 and needed a pair of identical drives for the best results. Long-term usage will tell if this was or was not a wise choice.

UPDATE @ 05-2012

After two months' use I have not yet seen a single issue, hiccup or anything that may suggest that I am likely to see any of the issues that others have reported. I am using them in a RAID configuration in a well-regarded enclosure equipped with a fan to cool them. Used for backup, reliability is imperative.

I've been running them constantly for a month on my Drobo S (they aren't recognised in the original Drobo though - beware).

The 3TB version of this drive is over 2TB so it is unlikely to work with many home systems. I bought one for my HP EX495 Mediasmart server (which claims to support all HDD capacities), the server did not recognise the drive, neither did my Dell XPS (Win 7 x64) which is a fairly new PC. There are issues regarding compatibility of any drives over 2TB, and although your OS may support it (like Win 7), your hardware might not. Check carefully. I don't know whether the one supplied was faulty, or incompatible, the supplier was co-operative about a refund.

The 2TB ones are great. I have three in a RAID that serve three home PCs and streams music and video to various players, they are reliable, quiet and work straight out of the box.

I've been using the drive for about 3 weeks. Started off well after I figured out how to make use of the 3TB capacity in Windows 7 (use the GPT partition as otherwise you'd only be able to use a max of 2TB). 3 Weeks down the line, accessing the drive became slow every so often. I open the drive (D:), drill down to a folder and it can be fine but other times, it takes 30 to 60 seconds. I put it down to the drive needing to wake up at first but then realised that it still shouldn't take that long.

This has frozen my computer a few times forcing me to reboot. I suspected it might have been Windows and its many disk access services, which I duly disabled. After a number of forced reboots due to my hung PC, I had the opportunity to run Check Disk while the computer was starting up. I left it to run each time (even if it took a few hours) and let it fix whatever needed fixing but have had the same problems.

I've also used the Western Digital Diagnostic tool. Ran a Quick Test which passed but after running an Extended test, it said there were too many bad sectors. Now the status is 'Warning' when I view the properites of the drive in the software.

This is the first time I've had a drive with this problem from new and I build/fix computers quite often. My own equipment in particular so this is rather disappointing.

While it was workihg though, I thought the performance was pretty decent. Read/Write was speedy. As it's a 'Green' drive, it doesn't generate much heat either which is good. I will however return this for a replacement and see how the replacement fairs.

Have tried seagate HDD but have not had much success so have gone back to WD.

Installed in NAS and computer without any problems.

Would by again. But am trying the WD Red drives now!