WD Caviar Green 3TB Hard Drive Review

Our Test Methodologies:  Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a different hard disk used for the OS and benchmark installations.  The drives were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO and Vantage benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 Powered

ATTO Disk Benchmark - Read/Write Performance Version 2.41

ATTO is a more straight-forward type of disk benchmark that measures transfers across a specific volume length.  It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart.  We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes over a total max volume length of 256MB.  This test was performed on blank, formatted drives with NTFS partitions.

Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB	Seagate Barracuda XT 3Gb/s
Western Digital RE4	Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

Right from the start, the Caviar Green 3TB did well with very small transfer sizes. Unfortunately, that advantage quickly disappeared once we get over 8kb files. By the end of the benchmark, the drive recorded 139MB/s read and 106MB/s write speeds.