WD Caviar Green 3TB Reviewed

Packaging
The packaging that the WD Caviar Green 3TB came in appeared to be OEM, but still came with the appropriate information that was needed in order to successfully install the 3TB drive. These included the drive itself, the manual, and the HBA from RocketRaid. As you can see, it was very easy to take everything out and everything appeared to be well protected from any kind of shipment movement. The drive and HBA all arrived in good condition and most everything was made out of recyclable cardboard which reflects the green aspect of this drive.


The box opened with the Quick Install Guide, drive, and HBA


All of the contents nicely packaged and protected


The side box holding the RocketRAID controller


The RocketRAID card utilizing the Marvell controller

Performance and User Experience

Setup
Intel Xeon X3350 [Q9450 Equivalent] CPU
4GB of Kingston HyperX DDR2-1066 RAM [Provided by Kingston]
DFi LT X38 T2R Motherboard
Coolermaster Real Power Pro 850w PSU [Provided by Cooler Master]
3TB Western Digital Caviar Green [Provided by Western Digital]
2TB Seagate Barracuda XT HDD [Provided by Seagate]
600GB Western Digital Velociraptor [Provided by Western Digital]

For this review, we wanted to stick with larger capacity drives and stay away from SSDs as we all know that SSDs would easily win this battle, but there is not SSD on the market that comes close to offering 1, 2 or even 3TB at a remotely affordable price. As such, we’ll be sticking with 3 HDDs in this review but we’ll cover the appropriate aspects of the drives. Furthermore, it is good to note that the WD Caviar Green is a 5400RPM drive while the other two are 7200 and 10,000 RPM respectively and that the WD Caviar Green does not run any hotter than either of the drives. Nevertheless, comparing this drive to those should give us a good idea of what kind of performance we can expect from a 3TB ‘green’ drive.