Hard disk capacities are growing at an ever-growing rate and the cost per gigabyte has gone down to the point where $99 can get you 2TB of storage space, that’s a mere 5 cents a gigabyte. This compares to the thousands of dollars you would have to spend on a hard disk 20 years ago, or several hundred dollars per gigabyte. The reason costs have gone down is that the density for each platter on the hard drive has increased while the size of the drive has remained the same. Another factor is the advent of Solid State Drives for the mainstream user.
Western Digital has been making HDDs for a long time being one of the oldest consumer hard disk manufacturers and was one of the fist drive manufacturers to hit 1TB for consumer hard disks and 2TB of storage space. Today they are launching the first 3TB Hard Disk drives and to hit the market the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB drive. This drive is retailing for $249, making it an interesting alternative for those wanting more storage space without paying the cost premium that a SSD would require.
The Western Digital 3TB HDD is a member of the 5th generation of Caviar Green product line. This drive has a capacity of 3000GB or 3 Terabytes which is pretty amazing. The drive has four platters each of which contains 750GB of data storage capacity. The drive has a 64MB cache and is on the SATA II (3 Gb/second) interface. As is usual with SATA drives, Native Command Queuing is supported.
One issue that manufacturers have with the increasing HDD space is that motherboards are using Master Boot Records and the system BIOS. Hard Disk Drives generally have a 512 byte sector size which if you work out the math gives a maximum size of 2.19TB or 2 to the 32nd power of storage space. This is a hard limit and is similar to what happens when you try to install 4GB of memory into a system running 32-bit Windows.
One way to break the 2.19TB barrier is to use a larger sector size and keep the number of addressable blocks the same. Using a sector size of 4096 bytes would result to have up to 17.59TB of addressable space, which is 2 to the 32nd power times 4096. The issue with doing that is applications are designed for sector sizes of 512 bytes and issues would occur with compatibility. Western Digital has transitioned some of their drives to using 4096 byte sized sectors with them emulating the 512 byte sectors to maintain compatibility.
WD and other computer related companies have begun releasing solutions to replace the MBR and the BIOS. The BIOS will be replaced in newer systems by something called UEFI which stands for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. The replacement for the MBR is called GUID Partition Tables or GPT. This transitions the storage partitions to 64-bit partitions for up to 18 Exabytes of Logical Block Addressing. The problem here is that there are incompabilities with system BIOS and 3rd party storage drivers, meaning that another solution needed to be found.
With few UEFI motherboards on the market, Western and Seagate had a choice, either find an interim solution to bridge the gap between the lacks of UEFI motherboards or wait until the boards reach enough saturation for them to be widely used. Western Digital is bundling a HighPoint RocketRAID 620 card with their HDD to allow the users to address all 3TB of HDD space on the drive without it having a UEFTI to address 3TB instead of 2.19TB. The card requires a free PCI Express x1 slot and acts as a Host Bus Adapter by enabling boot support for 64-bit operating systems such as Apple’s OSX 10.5, Windows 7 64-bit or Linux.
The 3.0TB Caviar Green HDD arrived in a plain brown box. Inside the box the HDD was bundled with two plastic end pieces to ensure no damage was done to the HDD in transit. Also included was the HighPoint RocketRAID PCI Express card to enable this drive to work with the larger capacity on motherboards without UEFI.
The drive itself is the same size and shape as the 1TB and 2TB drives from Western Digital. In point of fact if you look at two drives from the Caviar Green family of 1TB or 3TB visually there is little difference. The top of the drive has the Part Number and Serial Number sticker with the various bits of information on the drive there. The back of the drive has the SATA Power and Data ports plus jumpers for Master/Slave. The sides have three holes for mounting the drive into a 3.5” drive bay.
Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Performance
