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Western Digital Announces Caviar Green 2.5 TB and 3 TB SATA Hard Drive

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Never had a WD drive go bad on me...ever. I still have some WD IDE drives running.
 
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Is it possible to use this as a boot drive if you create two partitions and make the boot partition smaller than 2TB on a normal BIOS mainboard that does not support EFI?
 

Nibrok

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Just picked up (5) 2tb Samsung F4 drives for a raid 5 array @ $95 each and they are smokin fast. Also, I have a 5tb raid box all with 1gb WD Green drives and never had a problem with them. Although I will have to agree with the other person who post about the sequential write speeds with the WD's, they are slooooooooooooooooow.
 
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My real reason: because they're 3TB.

I do like WD, but also Seagate and the others who are still producing today. There is one exception -Samsung- who I haven't bought yet (but I have a couple 2TB drives in my cart right now).

My rough estimate counting personal and work systems that I oversaw in the last eight years, 2 bad drives in 900. Even had good luck with Deathstars. I had them in air-cooled bays, so the idea that it may have been a heat issue with them seems plausible. Don't know if an official reason was ever given by IBM or not. Not that it's important now.
 
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i hope you have a computer with EFI instead of a BIOS, cause otherwise you wont be able to use one of these as a system drive.

So that's good news to Mac owners (except for the lack of BootCamp support), since all modern Macs use EFI. I'm sure a lot of professionals will be looking forward to the added drive space.
 

Imperceptible

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As if you would want to use one of these as your main drive. Get an SSD and use this as storage, obviously. As for data loss, you'll find more and more people are making sure to backup their vital data, either with an external enclosure or a NAS. I myself would be interested in having 2 of the Black series (once they are out) as internal drives and then using a NAS with 2 of these Green variants as backup. But I'll need to wait for the premium to be knocked off the price.

EDIT: After reading Anand's review, he is suggesting the same thing:

But I wouldn't recommend using it as a boot/application drive, the random performance and even light workload performance just doesn't measure up. The 3TB drive (or a pair of them in RAID 1) would be a great companion to an SSD for all of your mass storage needs.
 
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i've had many WD blacks die on me for no reason. they just fried overnight, in the same enclosures that seagates and samsungs still run fine in.

WD blacks are barely faster than my 5,400RPM samsung 2TB's - if that.


WD cost more, use more power, make more heat, and arent any faster than samsung - so i see no reason to go them.

oh and as for their green drives which negate some of those problems.... SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOW at sequential writes. from personal experience, never again.

Hmmm....that works the other way around for me......
I never had a prob. with my WD´s, but two of my four Samsungs F1 (1TB) died on me ... They are in the same enclosure as my Caviar Black 2TB´s.....
and when we are @ it .... I still have two 74 GB Raptors running, and they are 7 years old.....so I´ll stik with WD.....
 

bear jesus

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The problem is with Windows actually, not BIOS itself. At least so i heard in some other thread.

I thought it was a problem with both but to be honest i really dont have much of an idea about the causes of the 2.19tb limit.

From the legit reviews review
"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."

In the review they used the drive as a secondairy and used the included pci-e to connect the drive to the test setup so i would assume the os is a major problem but have no clue if it could be used as a primary drive even with the included adaptor :confused: I have no idea, what about 2 2tb drives raided, does that not cause problems due to the os seeing it as a single 4tb drive? :confused:

I give up :laugh:
 

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The problem is with Windows actually, not BIOS itself. At least so i heard in some other thread.

its two problems

windows cant use partitions above 2TB except in 64 bit
BIOS cant boot from partitions (or is it drives?) that are greater than 2TB
 
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* To boot from this (>2,2 TB) drive you need a 64-bit OS (Vista/7) and UEFI.
* To use it (>2,2 TB) as a secondary drive without UEFI you need Vista/7 and the HBA controller.
* The disk must be partitioned with GPT to use more than 2,2 TB due to the limitations of MBR.

Gathered from WD and Wiki, please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
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Another problem is external Hdd cases ,none of them on market can see more than 2TB atm iirc
its two problems

windows cant use partitions above 2TB except in 64 bit
BIOS cant boot from partitions (or is it drives?) that are greater than 2TB
 

btarunr

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its two problems

windows cant use partitions above 2TB except in 64 bit
BIOS cant boot from partitions (or is it drives?) that are greater than 2TB

That's why Windows 7 setup prompts you to create that 100 MB boot partition, so that BIOS boots from a 100 MB logical drive.
 
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I still don't get why anyone would want to boot from these drives? Their sher size will now effect speed. I would never use a drive larger than 1 TB as a system drives cause I just don't see a reason to do it.
 

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I still don't get why anyone would want to boot from these drives? Their sher size will now effect speed. I would never use a drive larger than 1 TB as a system drives cause I just don't see a reason to do it.

Obviously it's the same kind of people who would want 2 in raid 0 for a 6tb boot drive :laugh:
 
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We have to one day ,hdds over 2TB will be norm someday and we will see a lot of people coming and asking why they are having problem(s) .Not just for today .

I still don't get why anyone would want to boot from these drives? Their sher size will now effect speed. I would never use a drive larger than 1 TB as a system drives cause I just don't see a reason to do it.
 
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