WD Caviar Green 3TB Reviewed

Real World Testing
After the synthetic tests, we ran a series of real world tests to test the performance in real world applications and to determine the performance consumers can expect when using the drive.

First we ran Cinebench 11.5 like we have in the past.



Looking at our Cinebench results, the WD Caviar Green 3TB doesn’t actually look to be too much worse than the slowest drive that we ran which was the Barracuda XT. This performance difference is likely reflected by the fact that the XT is a 7200RPM drive which does make it faster.

Next we ran a series of two write tests that tested both large file writes and a series of many thousands of smaller file writes. These came in the forms of a single 3GB 1080P file and a 5GB folder containing 3,133 pictures.





Looking at both of these graphs, we see that the WD Caviar Green really starts to struggle in writes especially when we went with the smaller file writes. It was almost twice as slow in the small write test as both the Barracuda XT 2TB and the Velociraptor 600GB. In the case of the VelociRaptor, it was actually more than twice as slow, which is a bit concerning since this is supposed to be considered a data backup drive before anything else. When we look at the single large file test, we see more of the same, but at a slightly less significant scale. The 32 seconds it took the WD Caviar Green 3TB was 11 seconds slower than the VelociRaptor and 8 seconds slower than the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB.

Based on the running of our real world tests, we notice a fairly wide rift between the 3TB drive and the rest of the drives that we’ve tested in the past. While we do understand that this is a ‘green’ drive, we would have like to see better numbers than these. All we can hope for is that Western Digital comes out with faster drives that can replace these ‘Green’ drives, as they lack the performance to be effective backup drives.