WD Caviar Green 3TB Reviewed

Value
WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB hard drives [model number WD25EZRSDTL] and 3 TB hard drives [model number WD30EZRSDTL] are available now in the U.S. at select resellers and distributors. MSRP for the WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB hard drive is $189.00 USD and the 3 TB hard drive is $239.00 USD. WD Caviar Green hard drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty. Based on this, we can conclude that if you need the space, the 3TB drive is a better solution if speed is not a factor and you do also get the HBA card included as well which does drive up the value added factor. Overall, though, based on the performance we’re a little hesitant to say that these drives are still appropriately priced. They are cheaper than what we would have expected, but we believe that is because of the lacking performance.

Conclusion
The Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB drive overcomes a boundary that has taken hard drive manufacturers quite some time to overcome, but it falls short of wowing us. The overall performance of the drive is extremely lacking and we found that even as a backup drive, it lacked the speed that it’s other competitors offered. Heck, WD’s own 2TB Caviar Black drive would be a better choice when comparing to the 2.5TB drive that WD offers.

If you absolutely need 3TB, this is without a doubt the drive to go with but we do caution that these drives are slow and we’d probably recommend waiting for the Caviar Blue or Caviar Black versions to get acceptable performance levels out of these drives. The synthetic numbers themselves looked promising, but once we started to test these speeds against our real world tests, the drive's capabilities really began to show and we were reminded that we were dealing with a 'green' drive.

The good thing, though, was that this drive ran cooler and quieter than either of our drives and is probably one of the saving graces of this drive. For being the first 3TB drive that isn't hot and is still quiet, we still are comfortable with awarding the WD Caviar Green 3TB with the BSN* mainstream innovation award.