TREADLAYERS.COM: WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR GREEN WD30EZRS 3TB

WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR GREEN WD30EZRS 3TB

Western Digital's 3TB Caviar Green monster just hit the shelves, and once again, the tech industry has surpassed another legacy barrier in storage. It's capacity is impressive in itself, but the green features add to the value of the drive. Here are it's specs from WD:

WD Caviar Green 3 TB SATA Hard Drives
( WD30EZRSDTL)

Performance Specifications
	Rotational Speed	IntelliPower *
	Buffer Size	64 MB

Transfer Rates
	Buffer To Host (Serial ATA)	3 Gb/s (Max)

Physical Specifications
	Formatted Capacity	3,000,592 MB
	Capacity	3 TB
	Interface	SATA 3 Gb/s
	User Sectors Per Drive	3,907,029,168

Physical Dimensions
English
	Height	1.028 Inches
	Depth	5.787 Inches
	Width	4.00 Inches
	Weight	1.61 Pounds

Metric
	Height	26.1 mm
	Depth	147 mm
	Width	101.6 mm
	Weight	0.73 kg

Environmental Specifications
Shock
	Operating Shock (Read)	65G, 2 ms
	Non-operating Shock	250G, 2 ms

Acoustics
	Idle Mode	24 dBA (average)
	Seek Mode 0	29 dBA (average)
	Seek Mode 3	25 dBA (average)

Temperature (English)
	Operating	32° F to 140° F
	Non-operating	-40° F to 158° F

Temperature (Metric)
	Operating	-0° C to 60° C
	Non-operating	-40° C to 70° C

Electrical Specifications
Current Requirements
	12 VDC
	Read/Write	296 mA
	Idle	243 mA
	Standby	3 mA
	Sleep	3 mA

	5 VDC
	Read/Write	503 mA
	Idle	172 mA
	Standby	160 mA
	Sleep	160 mA

	Power Dissipation
	Read/Write	6.00 Watts
	Idle	5.50 Watts
	Standby	0.80 Watts
	Sleep	0.80 Watts

As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes,
one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one
trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating
environment. As used for buffer or cache, one megabyte (MB) =
1,048,576 bytes. As used for transfer rate or interface, megabyte per
second (MB/s) = one million bytes per second, megabit per second (Mb/s)
= one million bits per second, and gigabit per second (Gb/s) = one billion
bits per second.

64MB cache is a big plus to make up for the lowered RPMs. But the 3gbps interface is getting outdated. Like the WD Caviar Blue, this WD Caviar Green drive has a 3-year warranty. Only the Caviar Black series have a the 5-year warranty.

Remember how 48-bit LBA was required to use HDDs larger than 128GB? Well, the 3TB drive exceeded the 2.199TB barrier - the limit for 32-bit MBR addressing. Issues such as bootability, a single 3TB partition, and using GPT over MBR, and EFI vs BIOS need to be considered with such a drive. Fortunately, WD ships the WD30EZRS with a HighPoint RocketRAID 62X PCIe x1 HBA. This HBA not only ensures the OS can work with the drive, but also allows your motherboard to boot from it as well.

But we here do not use HDDs anymore for boot drives, right? We're all SSD, all the way. So we're not gonna bother talking about how easy it was to install Win7 on the 3TB drive during a test run. We know that this 3TB will be part of a massive library of other drives, connected to RAID cards or SATA expanders.

We tested the WD30EZRS using a Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 motherboard with an AMD Phenom II 965BE and 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory. Win7 x64 was installed on an SSD, and the WD30EZRS was connected to the SATA 6Gbps southbrige controller. Here's what we got:

For a slow-spinning HDD, the WD30EZRS has superb performance numbers, most likely because of the 64MB cache and well-written firmware. Atto shows sustained reads at 250MB/s. Surely, burst rates will exceed the 3.0 Gbps interface rate, and WD should really consider upgrading this and future models to SATA 6Gbps. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the HBA will solve headaches for nearly all buyers of this drive. Just be careful putting all your important data on a single spindle without having backups!