Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB

The WD30EZRSDTL Caviar Green hard drive is one of Western Digital's latest and it boasts a phenomenal 3TB of storage capacity.

To use the Caviar's capacity however your machine will have to tick the following prerequisites; it needs to have a 64-bit operating system, it should support GPT (GUID Partition Table) partitions rather than standard MBR (Master Boot Record) and, last but not least, your motherboard will need to have a UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). UEFI is the successor to the aging BIOS found on most machines.

If your PC lacks any of these components however you can still use the Caviar Green by purchasing a specific host bus adapter (HBA) such as Highpoint's RocketRaid 62x. Thankfully, if you buy the Caviar Green as a retail boxed drive Western Digital provides a HBA that allows you to use the drive in even older machines.

Fitting the Green to our test rig we were able to configure and format the drive into a single 3TB bootable partition. Putting the drive through its paces we were blown away by its tremendous figures. In our HD Tune Pro read and write tests, the drive managed average speeds of 91MB/sec and 90MB/sec. These are exceptionally high figures for a drive that isn't fitted with a 7,200rpm or 10,000rpm spindle motor.