western digital 2tb internal hard drive caviar black

WD’s 3.5” external drives fall under the My Book brand and they have visibly more ventilation than the GoFlex Desk I reviewed.Īs luck would have it, last week Western Digital announced its own 3TB external drive: the My Book Essential. I wasn’t terribly pleased and I wondered if Western Digital’s external enclosure might be better suited for heat dissipation. The performance of the drive wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but the poorly ventilated chassis seemed ill equipped to deal with the thermal load a 5-platter, 7200RPM 3TB drive would throw at it. It was a 5 platter, 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT inside an external GoFlex Desk chassis. I can't afford losing them, and the Caviar Black drive appears to me to be the most cost-effective way of getting long term reliability.Two months ago I looked at the world’s first 3TB desktop hard drive. My video files represent too much of an investment of time and work creating them.

It only affects the Green drives, not Black. The DOS executable wdidle3.exe can be downloaded from the wd website and may alleviate the problem. Google 'wd green problem' or 'wd green wdidle3' for more information. I wanted to buy WD's Caviar Green model, but it has a major design flaw: the energy-saving logic causes it to park its heads too often, which many people feel dramatically shortens the life of the drive. WD's Caviar Black is one of the few still carrying a five year warranty, and it's now the only hdd I buy other than WD Velociraptors when they come on sale. Ten years ago I bought mostly Seagate drives, but they have gone downhill.įive year warranties used to be common, now they are much shorter.

It's becoming harder to find a good hard drive.

Overall Review: I have five desktop computers and have bought quite a few hard drives over the last nearly 25 years. I haven't had a problem with a WD drive since the mid 1990s, so I don't anticipate any trouble. I don't expect problems but will post an update if any problems occur. I have it mounted in an external eSATA enclosure. I bought this drive for my my video work, which consumes ever more storage space.

Pros: Five year warranty, should be very durable if it's like my other WD Caviar Black drives, reasonably quiet.

Western digital 2tb internal hard drive caviar black