Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB Hard Drive Review

In terms of mechanical style hard drives, Western Digital pretty much have the market sewn up and have done since the beginning of time. The inclusion of the Caviar Green range of drives has instantly made them a hit with tree huggers everywhere as it offers performance for the power concious. It does so by changing things up in terms of the 750GB platters used which cuts down on power and in conjunction with that; heat.

This drive was never aimed at being the fastest on the market but does undercut the competition in terms of power and of course price and still benefits by offering some reasonable performance results which being honest, were miles ahead of where we were expecting them to be.

Using a SATA III interface was going to be included as all drives in this day and age are, but having the thought behind for those without the faster interface and including the Highpoint Rocket 620 was pure genius. The card itself retails at around £30 so kudos has to go to Western Digital for thinking of their consumers who may have slightly older and not as well performing boards with older SATA interfaces.

Throughout our testing of the Caviar Green 3TB, we couldn’t hear anything abnormal and going back to using a mechanical drive wasn’t noticeable over the rest of our system components such as fans and that’s what’s so great about this. We even have a feeling that it will make you feel better as you use it as you’re doing yourself for the environment with a Caviar Green.

Overall, looking at the performance, you can see it’s pretty quick considering it’s sheer capacity and when comparing against other drives similar on the market, it’s right up there with them and provides a faster solution than some of the enclosed USB interfaced drives that can only handle a slow transfer rate.

Pricing is where this drive really shines as it keeps up with the likes of the Hitachi Deskstar 3TB at but has a better, more recognized branding behind it that the Hitachi simply lacks due to bad press in the past. Coming in at £167.87 from Scan we can see how it’s rivalling some of the enclosures such as the FreeAgent which simply offers a much slower speed, though hard drives have seen a turn for the worse altogether due to problems at the manufacturing plants. If you have the room for putting an internal drive into your system over an external, we’d recommend it every time.