3TB on a Western Digital Caviar Green HDD

Late last year, WD and Seagate announced they will be able to cramp
3TB (that’s terabytes or 1,000GB) on a single disk. Three terabytes is
already pretty massive even in this age of torrents and large full HD
movies. Imagine if you have at least 2 of these in your desktop PC at
home.

Western Digital Philippines sent us one of these 3TB drives to test out.



The disk is composed of 4 platters with each platter having a capacity of 750GB.

Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB
3TB capacity
64MB cache
5400 rpm
Read Seek: 15ms
Latency: 5.5ms
SATA 3Gb/s

A 3TB storage has an estimated capacity of 750,000 songs, or can
store up to 600,000 photos and play up to 230 hours of movies/videos.

Unlike most of the low-capacity hard drives, installing and using the
3TB WD HDD isn’t just as simple as plug-and-play. My old Core 2 Quad
Windows 7 system was able to detect the HDD and saw it install device
drivers. However, the drive wasn’t showing up on File Manager after
that. The device manager lists the correct model as well as 3rd party
app Speccy. So I rebooted the PC and went on to BIOS to check the
settings. Turns out it’s only detecting something like 860GB instead of
the entire 3TB.

Looks like you need to do some more tweaking before you can use this drive like this one outlined by Western Digital. AnandTech explains the 2.19TB barrier here as well.

The WD Caviar Green 3TB sells for around Php9,800 in stores.