http://www.maximumpc.com | XXX 2010 | MAXIMUMPC |xx
3TB Western Digital
Caviar Green
Finally, a bootable 3TB hard drive—for
select systems
I
t’s been nearly two years since we saw
the first 2TB drives hit the market.
You’d think we would have gotten
3TB drives months ago. It’s not that hard,
is it? Turns out, it’s pretty complicated.
We’ll get into all that in a second, but in the
meantime, here’s what you need to know:
Western Digital’s new 3TB Caviar Green
drive is the fi rst internal bootable 3TB
drive to hit the market. It’s not the fi rst 3TB
drive—Western Digital and Seagate both
have external versions—but it is the fi rst
bootable 3TB drive.
So, why are we only now seeing
bootable 3TB drives? Because most comput-
ers are running on kludged-together legacy
systems, that’s why! Hard drives have
historically been divided into 512-bit sec-
tors. Your drive’s master boot record, which
tells the BIOS where everything is on a
given drive, is 32-bit, so it can only address
a number of sectors equal to one 32-bit
integer’s worth. Two to the 32nd power is
4,294,967,296; multiply that by 512 bytes
and you get 2.19TB, which is how big a
partition can be before the MBR runs out of
room to fi gure out where everything is. To
overcome this obstacle, your PC needs to
meet a laundry list of requirements: It needs
a 64-bit OS, a motherboard that supports
UEFI (the successor to the BIOS), and sup-
port for GPT partitions rather than MBR.
If your PC meets those requirements,
you should be able to create a bootable
3TB partition on WD’s new 3TB Caviar
Green. Just to make sure, Western Digital
includes an off-the-shelf HBA (host bus
adapter) with a carefully vetted chipset/
driver combo—HighPoint’s RocketRaid
62x—which allows users to bypass their
motherboard’s south-bridge storage driv-
ers. In our experience, most motherboard
south-bridge drivers aren’t quite ready for
3TB drives. When we tried formatting ours
from the Intel ICH10R on our test bed, it
showed up as an 800GB drive, and we’ve
heard reports of similar issues from other
south-bridge drivers, so WD’s inclusion of
an HBA with a tested driver set was wise.
We were able to create a working
Windows 7 install on a 3TB GPT partition
on the 3TB Caviar Green using the HBA. We
benchmarked the drive on our standard
motherboard test bed against the 2TB
Caviar Green (reviewed May 2009) and
Seagate’s similarly spec’d 2TB Barracuda
LP (reviewed October 2009). We tested all
three drives using the RocketRaid HBA with
GPT partitions. Thanks to its four 750GB plat-
ters—and phenomenal areal density—the
3TB Caviar Green was the fastest in average
sequential read and write speeds, topping
92MB/s in both. However, it lagged behind
the other drives in our PCMark Vantage and
Premiere Pro benchmarks.
The 3TB Caviar Green is fast (inasmuch
as a low-power drive can be), enormous,
and—given that it ships with a useful two-
port 6Gb/s SATA HBA—a good deal at $240
(although, as always, it’s cheaper to buy
two 1.5TB drives, or even two 2TB drives).
But the percentage of users with the UEFI-
compatible hardware necessary to create
a 3TB boot partition is still tiny, and moth-
erboard SATA drivers are still flaky when
it comes to partitions greater than 2.19TB.
That said, most Maximum PC readers who
are buying huge storage drives are boot-
ing from smaller, speedier drives, so the
partition-size limit likely won’t bother you,
and WD deserves massive props for getting
the drive out there. Now that drives exist
that require UEFI, hopefully motherboard
vendors will have incentive to jump on the
bandwagon. –NATHAN EDWARDShttp://www.maximumpc.comwww.maximumpc.comwww.maximumpc.comwww.maximumpc.com||||XXXXXXJANJAN 2010 2010 2011 ||||MAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC|||| 83 xx 83 xx
VERDICT$240, http://www.wdc.com8
First bootable 3TB
drive; free two-port
6Gb/s HBA; 90MB/s+
sequential speeds.Mobo UEFI support
still lacking; lags
behind 2TB drives in
some tests.TED STURGEON3TB WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR GREENDAN BROWN