WD 3TB Green released

CA_Steve · **Posted:** Tue Oct 19, 2010 8:06 am

Here's Storage Review's take.

4 platter design, fastest in it's class, lower power. Downside is whether or not it'll work in your PC due to the 2.2TB limit issues.

NeilBlanchard · **Posted:** Tue Oct 19, 2010 8:43 am

Thanks for the news, Steve!

Edit:

Quote:

Windows and some Linux variants hit the 2.19TB capacity limit because they can only address 232 logical blocks (OSX is not affected by this limitation).

(Emphasis is mine.)

MikeC · **Posted:** Tue Oct 19, 2010 9:45 am

NeilBlanchard wrote:

Thanks for the news, Steve!

Edit:

Quote:

Windows and some Linux variants hit the 2.19TB capacity limit because they can only address 232 logical blocks (OSX is not affected by this limitation).

(Emphasis is mine.)

Yes, but it appears the BIOS will still limit the boot disk size to 2.19TB -- from the same article: "To be able to boot from a drive larger than 2.19TB, the BIOS and system drivers need to agree on capacity and layout of the hard drive to boot and operate properly."

Also, 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Vista SP1 and later, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 all seem to support UEFI, which needs to replace the BIOS.

rpsgc · **Posted:** Tue Oct 19, 2010 10:03 am

CA_Steve wrote:

Downside is whether or not it'll work in your PC due to the 2.2TB limit issues.

I don't think that will be a problem.

Quote:

The WD Caviar Green 2.5TB and 3TB drives have capacities in excess of 2.19 TB and this presents barriers for PC hardware, firmware and software. To get around these issues WD is bundling its WD Caviar Green 2.5 and 3 TB hard drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), which will enable the operating system to use a known driver with correct support for large capacity drives.

Source: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1442/1/

CA_Steve · **Posted:** Tue Oct 19, 2010 12:15 pm

From the Storage review article:

Quote:

Compatibility

In the introduction we mentioned that WD knew from the start that there would be some compatibility issues with various systems, but they didn’t want to hold back this drive back any longer. In our lab we actually ran into a problem of getting the Caviar Green 3TB drive to recognize its proper capacity in our test rig, even with the HBA add-on card. No matter what we did the drive would only recognize as a 746GB drive.

In one of our alternate Linux-based systems the add-on card actually worked as intended, showing the drive’s full capacity, and allowing us to run the Crystal Disk Mark tests on the very outside and inside of the platters. In our test rig we were only able to make use of the outside 1/3 of the drive, which was fine for our IOMeter tests, but would have given false readings in CDM.

We also tested the 3TB Caviar Green in two NAS units being tested in our lab, including a Synology DS411+ and a QNAP TS-459. Both models recognized the drive as a 3TB model and were eager to create a properly sized single partition on the drive. Neither seemed to throw as much of a fit as our Dell XPS 9000, which wouldn’t show more than a 746GB capacity with or without the HBA.

I think it'll be a YMMV kind of problem.

NeilBlanchard · **Posted:** Tue Oct 19, 2010 5:35 pm

Questions:

Would this boot on an OSX 10.6 iMac, and/or would it be at full 3TB capacity in an external enclosure, as a backup drive on a Mac? In Windows/Linux is the 2.2TB limit there on external drives, as well as boot drives?

CA_Steve · **Posted:** Tue Oct 19, 2010 7:09 pm

MacOS 10.6 is supported in all modes according to the table in the article..although if in an external enclosure, the bridge chip needs to support it as well.

As for Widows and Linux, I'll let you decipher the table.

KayDat · **Posted:** Tue Oct 19, 2010 10:15 pm

Review from Anandtech.

Tzeb · **Joined:** Sat Apr 30, 2005 4:29 pm **Posts:** 103

Dang... I'm still on 32bit XP. How would this drive appear in "disk management"? Is it possible to create two partitions like this : 2TB + 1TB?
How about HFS+? I use macdrive to format and use some HFS+ drives in XP. Would 32bit XP see a HFS+ 3TB drive, connected via an eSATA enclosure?

CA_Steve · **Posted:** Wed Oct 20, 2010 8:18 am

First reasonable explanation I've seen for the Green's spindle speed setting (from the Anandtech review):

Quote:

Spindle speed is another differentiating factor between WD’s drive and the earlier Seagate offering. While the GoFlex Desk houses a 7200RPM hard drive, WD’s 3TB drive is sold under the Green label. Western Digital doesn’t disclose actual spindle speed as it isn’t consistent across all Green label drives. The 3TB specs simply list it as IntelliPower.

I asked WD for more specifics and I got a reasonable explanation. In the Green line WD optimizes for power consumption. It attempts to make all drives consume roughly the same amount of max power, which happens to be 3 - 5W below a typical 7200RPM drive. The spindle speed isn’t dynamic, it’s set at manufacturing and remains at that.

All green drives will spin below 6000 RPM and the spec never drops below 5400RPM. What this means is that all 2.5TB drives will spin at one speed while all 3TB drives may spin at another, both between that 5400 RPM to 6000 RPM range.

There's also more info regarding 64-bit LBA, how EFI is a low priority for the mobo vendors so existing mobo's may/may not get a BIOS update, and that your SATA controller also needs to support 64-bit LBA (why WD ships the HighPoint controller card with the HDD).

MikeC · **Posted:** Wed Oct 20, 2010 8:41 am

CA_Steve wrote:

First reasonable explanation I've seen for the Green's spindle speed setting (from the Anandtech review):

Quote:

...All green drives will spin below 6000 RPM and the spec never drops below 5400RPM. What this means is that all 2.5TB drives will spin at one speed while all 3TB drives may spin at another, both between that 5400 RPM to 6000 RPM range.

That is still bullshit. No GP drive we have ever tested has shown a fundamental peak other than 90Hz (ok, give or take a couple Hz). That means they ALL are designed to -- and do -- spin at 5400rpm. Period. The WD "IntelliPower" gobbledygook has always been just that -- gobbledygook. Anandtech should know better.

tay · **Posted:** Wed Oct 20, 2010 9:46 am

Please don't conflate OS support with BIOS support. 64 bit OS's will support the drive. As long as the are running an EFI type BIOS. Which all recent OS's support but only mac's come with working EFI BIOS's. This is my understanding.

CA_Steve · **Posted:** Wed Oct 20, 2010 3:14 pm

MikeC wrote:

That is still bullshit. No GP drive we have ever tested has shown a fundamental peak other than 90Hz (ok, give or take a couple Hz). That means they ALL are designed to -- and do -- spin at 5400rpm. Period. The WD "IntelliPower" gobbledygook has always been just that -- gobbledygook. Anandtech should know better.

Heh. Tells us how you really feel, Mike.

Regardless of the rpm smoke and mirrors, it's still cool to watch these increases in areal density and performance. I'm hoping to see some 1 and 2 platter versions as well.

dhanson865 · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 4:40 am

MikeC wrote:

CA_Steve wrote:

First reasonable explanation I've seen for the Green's spindle speed setting (from the Anandtech review):

Quote:

...All green drives will spin below 6000 RPM and the spec never drops below 5400RPM. What this means is that all 2.5TB drives will spin at one speed while all 3TB drives may spin at another, both between that 5400 RPM to 6000 RPM range.

That is still bullshit. No GP drive we have ever tested has shown a fundamental peak other than 90Hz (ok, give or take a couple Hz). That means they ALL are designed to -- and do -- spin at 5400rpm. Period. The WD "IntelliPower" gobbledygook has always been just that -- gobbledygook. Anandtech should know better.

Ah yes, but the gobbledygook has taken a turn. They used to say 5400 to 7200 now they say 5400 to 6000.

We know seagate has 5900 RPM drives. So the question is did WD respond and try to match that RPM more closely from an engineering standpoint or did they just change their marketing?

I trust your analysis Mike, I'll just wait to see what happens when you get a 750GB platter drive in your hands.

vindicator8 · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 7:11 am

MikeC wrote:

Yes, but it appears the BIOS will still limit the boot disk size to 2.19TB -- from the same article: "To be able to boot from a drive larger than 2.19TB, the BIOS and system drivers need to agree on capacity and layout of the hard drive to boot and operate properly."

tay wrote:

Please don't conflate OS support with BIOS support. 64 bit OS's will support the drive. As long as the are running an EFI type BIOS. Which all recent OS's support but only mac's come with working EFI BIOS's. This is my understanding.

This limitation is applicable for OS using obsolete MS-DOS bootloader. Which is the case of all Windows versions including latest Windows 7.

Using 30 years old MS-DOS partition scheme and MS-DOS bootloader lead to many crazy problems Windows platform suffer. When such a PC/BIOS machine starts, BIOS executes code from MBR (LBA0), or let say first 448bit to be more accurate - rest is MS-DOS partition table. This code tell BIOS to seek through partition table and find the one marked with "boot" flag and start OS there. Because those 64bits reserved for partition table are capable to describe 4 partitions and less than 2,2TB drives, the ugly hack called extended partition (with logical partitions inside) was created to allow using more than 4 partitions (called primary).

So Because the great Microsoft operating system in 21th century stil boots like MS-DOS, it is impossible to have more than 4 primary partitions in Windows and in is impossible to install Windows to logical partition, it is impossible to use GPT on PC/BIOS system and it is impossible to boot from drives larger than 2,2TB.

On the other hand, you can boot Linux on PC/BIOS machine using GRUB bootloader and GPT partitioning scheme from even 400TB drive, without problem. There is almost nothing wrong with BIOS in this area, neither EFI should be considered a better solution at all :wink:

MikeC · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 7:26 am

OK, here's the confirmation about the new 3TB GP spindle speed.

Our 3TB WD GP sample arrived late yesterday afternoon. It's at idle in the anechoic chamber now, and I've been examining the live freq. spectrum feed on SpectraPlus at very high resolution, from 20~200Hz only. The main low frequency peak (fundamental, as audio guys call it) is centered right at 90Hz. Nothing else in the 90~120Hz range is even close to being a peak. (120Hz = 7200rpm; 90Hz = 5400rpm.) No change from previous WD GP drives.

RoGuE · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 10:08 am

this thread is so win :evil:

Seeing this news made me think about two things: one, like you mentioned, is that I'd love to see this same platter density carried over into the 1.5tb GP's. And two, having 3tb drives on the market will surely help lower the price of 'smaller' 1 and 2tb drives.

Thing is, I don't even have a full TB of storage on my rig, but when I get close to filling up my media drive, I go in there and delete all the shows that I've watched and therefore have no interest in seeing again. To those of you that easily fill up several TBs, what do you fill it with? I'm just curious. I can see the argument for high definition movies..but even then most movies I watch I don't really care to watch again..and the ones that I do, I keep and have plenty of room for.

EDIT: for clarity

MikeC · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 11:13 am

RoGuE wrote:

Thing is, I don't even have a full TB of storage on my rig, but when I get close to filling up my media drive, I go in there and delete all the shows that I've watched and therefore have no interest in seeing again. To those of you that easily fill up several TBs, what do you fill it with? I'm just curious. I can see the argument for high definition movies..but even then most movies I watch I don't really care to watch again..and the ones that I do, I keep and have plenty of room for.

My sentiments exactly! After a year of pulling down 720/1080 mkv movies & shows (new, old, ancient) off the web, I have just 1.3TB of data. Lousy shows I dump, decent ones I might keep; it's only the really memorable ones that I retain. And 1.3 TB includes my entire music collection of ~15,000 songs, mostly in FLAC format, maybe 20% in high res MP3 (256~320kbps). In fact, 9 years of SPCR -- not just the web site contents but every bit of research, reference papers, html files, thousands of original dig. photos, wav files of recordings, even ISOs of OSes and saved drive images of tested mobos, etc -- amounts to just ~80gb. Yeah, it could all fit on a single HDD from 8 years ago.

I know that we just posted a guide on how to build a silent 12tb server, but all of my personal and business digital data easily fits on a single 2TB drive. The real question is how does anyone fill something like a 12TB server -- not w/ garbage? :lol:

Modo · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 11:41 am

12 TB? Seems pretty sensible for GIS backups in a small company.

As noted by others, this is mostly good for lowering the prices of smaller drives. I'd watch the 2.5" hard disks. 1 TB is already there, so we're approaching a point where recommending 3.5" for a quiet rig won't make sense any more.

dhanson865 · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 12:25 pm

MikeC wrote:

OK, here's the confirmation about the new 3TB GP spindle speed.

Our 3TB WD GP sample arrived late yesterday afternoon. It's at idle in the anechoic chamber now, and I've been examining the live freq. spectrum feed on SpectraPlus at very high resolution, from 20~200Hz only. The main low frequency peak (fundamental, as audio guys call it) is centered right at 90Hz. Nothing else in the 90~120Hz range is even close to being a peak. (120Hz = 7200rpm; 90Hz = 5400rpm.) No change from previous WD GP drives.

OK, so marketing changes the gobbledygook and engineering keeps the same 5400 RPM. It deserves to be in bold

WD Green drives are ALL 5400 RPM, no WD Green drive has ever been measured at any other RPM.

CA_Steve · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 1:18 pm

Excellent

I was curious as to how much storage people use as well. Unscientific poll and you get into the "my PC or my PC and my server" issues...but there were a couple of people in the >4TB range.

I don't rip movies, so I doubt I'll ever need much more than 300GB of storage for my music and pictures...unless I start a photography rampage.

truckman · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 3:12 pm

MikeC wrote:

I know that we just posted a guide on how to build a silent 12tb server, but all of my personal and business digital data easily fits on a single 2TB drive. The real question is how does anyone fill something like a 12TB server -- not w/ garbage? :lol:

From my mythtv box:

Code:

% df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              24G   18G  4.2G  81% /
tmpfs                 1.4G  296K  1.4G   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             198M  104M   84M  56% /boot
/dev/sdq1             932G  924G  8.3G 100% /var/video/recordings00
/dev/sdj1             932G  925G  7.4G 100% /var/video/recordings01
/dev/sdd1             1.4T  1.4T  5.7G 100% /var/video/recordings02
/dev/sdg1             932G  927G  4.9G 100% /var/video/recordings03
/dev/sdo1             1.9T   30G  1.8T   2% /var/video/recordings04
/dev/sdi1             1.9T  1.9T  5.3G 100% /var/video/recordings05
/dev/sde1             1.4T  1.4T  6.4G 100% /var/video/recordings06
/dev/sdh1             1.4T  1.4T  5.1G 100% /var/video/recordings07
/dev/sdm1             1.9T  1.9T  8.4G 100% /var/video/recordings08
/dev/sdn1             1.9T  1.9T  5.5G 100% /var/video/recordings09
/dev/sdc              1.9T  1.9T  5.3G 100% /var/video/recordings10
/dev/sdb1             1.9T  1.9T  5.2G 100% /var/video/recordings11
/dev/sdk1             1.9T  1.9T  5.0G 100% /var/video/recordings12
/dev/sdf1             1.9T  1.9T  9.2G 100% /var/video/recordings13
/dev/sdl1             1.9T  1.8T   42G  98% /var/video/recordings14
/dev/sdp1             1.9T   23G  1.8T   2% /var/video/recordings15
/dev/sda4             439G  433G  5.6G  99% /var/video/recordings70
/dev/sdr1             699G  690G  9.5G  99% /var/video/recordings80

I generally nuke stuff after I watch it, but I've been getting a bit behind :roll:

I justed added another 5 drive eSATA enclosure and a couple more 2 TB drives a couple days ago. Until then I was swapped out most of my older 1TB drives and replacing them with 2 TB drives.

RoGuE · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 7:03 pm

truckman wrote:

I generally nuke stuff after I watch it, but I've been getting a bit behind :roll:

Have you ever seen the show Horders? You are the digital equivalent of those people.
Even in 1080p, it would take several lifetimes to watch that much TV.

truckman · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 8:08 pm

RoGuE wrote:

truckman wrote:

I generally nuke stuff after I watch it, but I've been getting a bit behind :roll:

Have you ever seen the show Horders? You are the digital equivalent of those people.
Even in 1080p, it would take several lifetimes to watch that much TV.

I've seen articles referring to it and I've seen it in the TV listings, but I haven't watched it. At least I'm not recording it for later viewing. :wink:

I'm actually recording quite a bit less now that I was earlier in the year. I recorded several series that I was interested in but never got a chance to watch when they were originally broadcast, but it looks like I've pretty much got all that backlog captured. It actually feels good when I scan the listings and don't find anything interesting to record.

I don't know about several lifetimes, but even if I was an average TV watcher (I'm well below average), I know I've got enough recorded to last me a good long time.

MikeC · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 9:16 pm

hm.... I only just found out about that show today when some folks mentioned it in passing, but hoarders suddenly seem all the rage. Tonight's CSI episode was called "House of Hoarders". :shock:

Modo · **Posted:** Thu Oct 21, 2010 10:33 pm

Wow, nice marketing work they did. Have you watched the latest South Park episode?

Pierre · **Posted:** Fri Oct 22, 2010 1:28 am

Good to see the higher capacity drives coming in...
2TB drives are already quite affordable, this will make it even more so...and when I have to start upgrading my hdds again - in about a year - hopefully these will be near the 150€ range...

I am now just barely under 8TB of active storage (7,90TB) and always searching (mainstream) ways to get less noise and more room in the case

Owen · **Posted:** Fri Oct 22, 2010 1:51 am

The 2.2TB limit issue looks too complicated. How about I just run it as a data drive on 32 bit Win 7? Will I need to bother with extra driver/controller/firmware?

Tzeb · **Joined:** Sat Apr 30, 2005 4:29 pm **Posts:** 103

MikeC, can you test the drive in xp 32bit for a few minutes? What happens when you start the drive (SATA/eSATA)after windows is loaded? How does the drive appear in disk management?

Also, could you have the drive formated HFS+ and then use macdrive on the xp machine to test if it's usable? (Macdrive can format the drive HFS+ from windows instantly).

Thanks.

CA_Steve · **Posted:** Fri Oct 22, 2010 4:41 am

truckman wrote:

RoGuE wrote:

Have you ever seen the show Horders? You are the digital equivalent of those people.
Even in 1080p, it would take several lifetimes to watch that much TV.

I've seen articles referring to it and I've seen it in the TV listings, but I haven't watched it. At least I'm not recording it for later viewing. :wink:

ROFL - maybe you should.

WD 3TB Green released

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