These days many consumers and enthusiasts are looking for massive storage capacities, and for more than a year the largest capacity desktop hard drive that you could buy was 2TB. All that changed today when Western Digital announced the world's first 3.0 Terabyte drive that is available for internal desktop use! Read on to see how this 3TB hard drive performs!

The Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB hard drive is a welcomed addition to the market as 3TB drives have been a long time coming. Our testing showed that the Caviar Green 3TB drive had decent performance as we saw it peak at roughly 128MB/s read and 107MB/s write in the benchmark ATTO. No doubt about it, other hard drives are faster, but that is not the point of this drive. Remember, this drive features four 750GB platters, 64 MB cache, and a SATA II 3.0Gbps interface. This drive is clearly aimed at mass storage and once we got it installed on our system we were able to get it up and running without and issues. We heard rumors that 3TB drives would run extremely hot, but during benchmarking we never noticed that it got over 37C and it normally idled at around 33-34C on the test bench. Not only was it cool, but it also was nearly silent as WD rates the drive up to 29dBA and we have cooling fans in our system that run louder than that...

While solid state drives get faster, mechanical hard drives get larger. Not long ago, we celebrated the first 1TB hard drive, and since then, welcomed 1.5TB and eventually 2TB drives to the consumer market. Yes, the performance increase that SSD's offer is more than impressive. However, they still can't touch the capacity that traditional hard drives provide tech-savvy, budget conscious consumers and system builders. When it comes to cost per gigabyte analysis, hard drives possess a huge advantage over SSD's.

Today, Western Digital announces the world's highest density hard drive, as they reach the 3TB mark with their newest, 5th generation Caviar Green product. To go along with its massive storage capacity, the Caviar Green 3TB serves up a super-sized combination of reduced power consumption, lower operating temperature, and a quieter operation. Read on to find out how well it performs and if it deserves to be on your upgrade list.

2.5 and 3.0 TB is here! Western Digital has pushed internal 3.5" drive capacity to 3 TB, breaking past the 2 TB barrier. Pushing platter density to 750 GB is quite an achievement, but taking a single HDD past 2^32 available sectors introduces some serious compatibility issues at both the OS and driver level.

While there are still significant technical hurdles to be overcome, someone has to take that first step in order to push progress along. Hopefully with the new drives out there we will see a quick turnaround on updated drivers and proper native support. Technical issues aside, I'm ecstatic to see such large capacity drives coming out at such a competitive price point.