3TB on a Western Digital Caviar Green HDD

Late last year, WD and Seagate announced they will be able to cramp 3TB (that’s terabytes or 1,000GB) on a single disk. Three terabytes is already pretty massive even in this age of torrents and large full HD movies. Imagine if you have at least 2 of these in your desktop PC at home.

Western Digital Philippines sent us one of these 3TB drives to test out.

The disk is composed of 4 platters with each platter having a capacity of 750GB.

Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB
3TB capacity
64MB cache
5400 rpm
Read Seek: 15ms
Latency: 5.5ms
SATA 3Gb/s

A 3TB storage has an estimated capacity of 750,000 songs, or can store up to 600,000 photos and play up to 230 hours of movies/videos.

Unlike most of the low-capacity hard drives, installing and using the 3TB WD HDD isn’t just as simple as plug-and-play. My old Core 2 Quad Windows 7 system was able to detect the HDD and saw it install device drivers. However, the drive wasn’t showing up on File Manager after that. The device manager lists the correct model as well as 3rd party app Speccy. So I rebooted the PC and went on to BIOS to check the settings. Turns out it’s only detecting something like 860GB instead of the entire 3TB.

Looks like you need to do some more tweaking before you can use this drive like this one outlined by Western Digital. AnandTech explains the 2.19TB barrier here as well.

The WD Caviar Green 3TB sells for around Php9,800USD 167INR 14,157EUR 159CNY 1,216 in stores.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

11 Comments

sylv3rblade says:

14 years ago

I wonder if NAS products in the market support 3TB, for the price, 3TB is awesome.
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Wakocoke says:

14 years ago

bitin na ako sa 1tb, might get one of these babies! or settle muna sa 2tb
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Andre says:

14 years ago

ya the higher the storage goes, the bigger your risk is. would be good to hook two of these up for raid-1 atleast so your data is safe from single drive failure.

sometimes its cheaper to store important stuff in the cloud rather than buy one of these.

might be fun to build a little box with a couple of these and make your own wireless NAS :)
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Nhoel says:

14 years ago

its 1024 actually.
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tam says:

14 years ago

expensive considering it’s less than $150 ($120 even) on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-3-5-Inch-Internal-DrivesWD30EZRSDTL/dp/B00471UDWI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306594620&sr=8-1
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Calvin says:

14 years ago

kelangan yung Host Bus Adapter, meron dapat kasama yan for every purchase of 3TB disk.
http://www.pinoytechblog.com/archives/what-you-need-to-know-before-getting-a-3tb-hard-disk
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JuanMarco says:

14 years ago

3TB paired with 5,400 rpm spindle speeds.. prepare for longer search times..
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jonaflormicfren says:

14 years ago

This is what I need now. http://youshudno.blogspot.com/2011/05/control-your-thought-to-manage-your.html
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bennix says:

14 years ago

Sir Abe, I think you should format it again to work properly in your system. I guess this 3TB HD is perfect for the coming Windows 8 based also on some experts prediction…:)
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Andre says:

14 years ago

dapat server grade harddrives if this big :)
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