Buy Western Digital Caviar 3TB SATA 6 GB/s 64MB Cache 3.5 inch OEM Internal Hard Drive GreenWestern Digital Caviar 3TB SATA 6 GB/s 64MB Cache 3.5 inch OEM Internal Hard Drive Green Product Description:
- Height:2.6 cm
- Buffer Size:64 MB
- Width:10.2 cm
- Depth:14.7 cm
- Weight:0.73 kg
Product Description
Storage
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
48 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
Loads of storage, but it is a tad slow and not always 32-bit OS or boot drive friendly
By Keith Joseph
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 apparently 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 [although to be safe I'd only buy this 3Tb drive within the Western Digital My Book Essential USB2/3 enclosure]. 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 this 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 will need the PCIe HBA card and either 32-bit or 64-bit Windows Vista/7 [not XP, that's external USB2 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 [I believe at present WD are only shipping this drive with the HBA card, as it's often useless without it, but check that].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 until you get a motherboard with UEFI BIOS. 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 - the latter is now how I 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, cutting edge comes at a cost, and as I write you could buy two Western Digital 2Tb Green drives significantly more cheaply - and these 2Tb drives have no complicated issues with 32-bit OS/UEFI BIOSes and HBA PCIe cards. WD Green drives only have a 3 year warranty though, compared to the faster WD Black's 5 year one. 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].
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Very nice drive with good response times
By Crazy_Chick
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
western digital reliability
By MIKES 45
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.
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