Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB and My Book Essential 3TB Drives Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 19, 2010 1:43 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- HDDs
- Western Digital
- 3TB
The Test
| CPU | Intel Core i7 965 running at 3.2GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset: | Intel X58 + Marvell SATA 6Gbps PCIe |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel IMSM 8.9 |
| Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
Sequential Read/Write Speed
Using the latest build of Iometer I ran a 3 minute long 2MB sequential test over the entire span of the drive. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length. Sequential read/write performance is very close to the older 7200RPM 1TB Caviar Black. The 3TB Caviar Green manages to come within 10% of the older 7200 RPM drive.
Random Read/Write Speed
This test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). Random read performance takes place over the entire LBA span of the drive so the two numbers will be different. I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time.
Both random read and write performance is pretty reasonable for a sub-6000 RPM hard drive. You're definitely not going to be as fast as a modern day 7200 RPM drive or a 10K RPM Raptor for random opterations, but for large file storage you should be fine.
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Photo-Nerd - Sunday, October 24, 2010 - link
It was slooooooooowwwwww, but on top of that, disk utility was reporting a smart failure.This drive equals the suck.
Boooooo
piroroadkill - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
You mean that now and then you get failures of <any product name here>?Colour me shocked.
pesos - Saturday, December 18, 2010 - link
Hi Anand, I bought a mybook 3tb usb3 drive with the intention of using it to store Hyper-V VHD virtual disk files.Hyper-V is reporting that it cannot use drives with 4k sector sizes (way to go, microsoft). I have heard that the built-in WSB (same engine used for win7 backups) also has this limitation.
Do you know if there is any way to get 512b emulation on the MyBook drives, or do I need to return this drive and go with a different solution?
Thanks,
Wes
Azaloom - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link
That bundled PCIe-card really looks like a 4-port card. Maybe that's why the HighPoint’s drivers won't work - they have altered the card a little bit and removed port 3 and 4 plugs as excessive? But the solder bases looks to be there on the circuit board. I wonder if you could make it into a 4 four port SATA card just by soldering the missing SATA data-ports to their bases on the board. I mean I already thought about bying this HDD because I have all the SATA ports in use on my MB, and this would give the possibility of adding not one but two more HDD's - who knows, it that's four with a little tweaking. One PCIe lane should be more than enough to drive 4 mainstream HDD's for the average user.coyote2 - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - link
If a 3TB drive is only formatted to < 2.19TB, would that remove all complications of booting from it?(Odd question, I know. But I'm buying a new system, for which I already own a boot drive I want to reinstall the OS onto; but the system builder requires that I buy the new system with the OS [Windows 7 Pro 64-bit] pre-installed; I'm just wondering if they only format a 3TB hdd to < 2.19TB, will booting from it will be issue-free?)
eazmichael - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
Is WD using the same HD model in the 3TB My book as the internal package? The stand-alone drive costs around $215 or more while the 3 TB My book is now available for less than $180. i was thinking about putting two of the drives in a Synology DS211+ enclosure (Raid 1) - it looks a bit like it is cheaper to buy two My Books and rip the drives out.burbello - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
Does anybody know if it is possible to replace the hard disk of Western Digital 640GB My Book for a new one with 3TB ? When replacing only the disk, should I perform any particular step? Thank you.burbello - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
I have an Western Digital 640GB My Book, I would like to replace the hard disk to another WD 3TB, but I am not sure if it will work, does anybody know if this is compatible or even if I have to perform any additional step? Thank you