Specs, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Specifications  

This drive adopts all features of the prior Caviar Green models, with the addition of a 750GB/platter bragging point:  
  • Advanced Format – The drive handles sectors internally with a 4kb block size. This makes for more efficient use of ECC and overall space.
  • NoTouch™ ramp load technology — Previously called “IntelliPark”.  Drive heads take an ‘exit ramp’ off of the platters instead of landing on the platters when the drive is spun down.  You know how the most damage is done to your engine when you start it on a cold morning?  This means the drive heads do not have to break stiction each and every time the drive spins up.  The heads are able to leave the ramp and float onto the spinning disk.  
  • Native Command Queuing (NCQ) — The drive can reorder groups of reads/writes to minimize overall head movement, and therefore increase effective access time.  Beware – this is only effective with an AHCI-enabled SATA controller.  
  • Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) — Bits are aligned vertically instead of horizontally to get more packed onto each platter.  Think dominoes (the game, not the food).
  • 64MB cache — Increased cache helps boost random access performance.

Specific to this Review

We were forced to bench with the included HighPoint Rocket 620. This threw some major curve balls into our test data, either from the dated driver support or from the benchmarks simply not playing nice with a >2^32 sector device.

Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB Review - Storage 31          

The 3TB Caviar Green and its accompanying HBA.

Testing Methods  

Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks.  PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases.  If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we’ll help you out! 

Test System Setup  
   
Hard Drive Test System Setup
CPU Intel Core i7 920 @ 4 GHZ (HT disabled)
Motherboard Asus P6T
Memory Corsair Dominator 6GB DDR3-1600
Hard Drive G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD 
Sound Card N/A
Video Card BFG Geforce 8400 GS 512MB PCI
Video Drivers Geforce 181.22
Power Supply Corsair CMPSU-650TX
DirectX Version DX9.0c
Operating System Windows XP X64 SP2 / Windows 7 Ultimate X64

  • PCMark05
  • Yapt
  • IOMeter
  • HDTach
  • HDTune  
  • PCPer File Copy Test
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