Interface Cards & Controllers

Best 3TB Internal Drive - Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Review

If you're one of those enthusiast who always in needs of huge disk space for your treasured files, the Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green is perfect for your massive storage requirements. Recently the 2TB was released and become the biggest drive available on the market. Due to the increasing demands for large storage, Western Digital breaks the 2TB mark and introduced the first 3TB internal hard drive.

What Is It In The WD 3TB Caviar Green Hard Drive?

The Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green runs at 5,400rpm with SATA II 3GB/s interface. It uses the same 4 platters just like their previous 2TB drives, but this time it has 750GB each. This drive is quiet; it doesn't produce that loud annoying sound. The noise level is only at 24dB at idle and a maximum of 29dB during read/write operations.

It consumes relatively less power which is good for energy savvy, 5.5W at idle, only 6W during read/write operations and 0.8W for sleep/standby. This drive is also cool; the temp ranges from 5 to 60 Degrees Celsius. With all of these features comes the idea of a green hard drive.     

The Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green is not a fast drive, not a hungry for speed stuff but rather a perfect backup storage. This drive is excellent for office and HTPC applications, also great for external drive. It is best when combined with the fast SSD as your boot drive and the Caviar Green would be your secondary drive. Another perfect application for this drive is for Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Issues With 3TB Hard Drives

There are issues regarding hard drives with more than 2TB, the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB is no exemption to that. This issues concerns in the older OS versions, older system using Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table doesn't support these especially the 32-bit. Because, 2^32 gives up only 2,199,023,255,252 bytes or equivalent to 2.19TB, this is the maximum addressable on the disk.

To resolve these issues, Western Digital hard drives with more than 2TB provide an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA). This will help the OS to use drivers with support of larger drives. This is in the form of PCI-E 2.0 1x adapter card with SATA III controller.

With this huge disk space, Western Digital move out from 512byte to 4Kb (4096 to be exact) sector size. The old 512byte is being use by a long time traditional MBR and the new one they called Advanced Format (AF) technology. The AF is not compatible with Windows XP and older version OS. Windows Vista and windows 7 users can take full advantage on the HBA to properly recognize the 3TB drive.

On the other hand, Apple OSX fully supports those drives with more than 2TB without the need of the HBA. However, if you're using a newer version of motherboards with GUID Partition Table (GPT) or UEFI BIOS support system, you don't need this adapter card, because they are design to accommodate these huge hard drives. If you want to use it as a primary boot disk, you'll need a 64-bit version of windows OS.      

Conclusion

The WD Caviar Green is design for low power, low noise, less heat and above all huge capacity drive. These categories are what they excel most. They can't compete against the newer 7,000rpm but a lot faster than the 5,400rpm competitors. This drive is perfect for data hungry enthusiast that serves as your secondary drive, but not as a primary boot disk. Combining it with the super fast SSD for your OS and the Caviar Green 3TB as your backup, this will make it a powerful duo. 

A big improvement over the previous 2TB version, I think it is due to its larger capacity per disk platter. A 750GB each platter for the 3TB, in contrast with only 500GB for 2TB is what makes the difference. It means that, a more dense platter have less travelling time for the heads to read/write the data's, therefore a faster access time is expected.

The inclusion of the 2 port SATA PCI-E card for the HBA is a big plus, in this case, you don't need to worry if you're using an older board to support this drive. The price point for this drive is within the reach but, far behind compare with the 2TB version. I guess their trying to justify its latest breakthrough in putting up this huge drive. At least they lowering it now since the day of its released, this is good news for consumers, as it becoming more competitive with other brands.

Overall, this is a great drive and very dependable as we already know the Western Digital's reputations in this industry. Cool, quiet, energy saver, efficient and high capacity, all the advantage in a single solid performing drive. This is what the Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green is all about. Read the full Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Review and discover the Top 3 Best 3TB Internal Hard Drive for 2011.

About the Author

Learn the 10 things you should know in finding the best hard drive and discover the Best 3TB Hard Drive for 2011. 

The Advantages Of HP Envy 14-1260SE

Hi friend, today we will bring in HP Envy 14-1260SE, that is a new released 14.5-inch Beats Edition Notebook, packed together with a 2.66GHz Intel Core i5-480M Processor, 6GB DDR3 RAM, and 750GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive. The laptop streaks 14.5Inch diagonal High Definition HP BrightView LED Display at 1366 x 768 res, and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 switchable graphics with 1024MB DDR3 memory with about 3738MB full graphics memory.

You might feel that the books of a laptop with only 1.1" slim and 5.69 could be dropped in the crowd. But with a dark hood in brushed light weight aluminum and smooth-touch surfaces all through the entire body with wire and a impressive backlit keyboard lights up red, HP ENVY14 Model is the core. Its 14.5" diagonal Hi-def HP BrightView Infinity Display LED delivers color, contrast and clarity, videos, shows and games for life. Custom background beats finished the appearance super-cool.

The HP Envy 14-1260SE notebook also contains integrated web camera, Slot-loading SuperMulti 8X DVD±R/RW with Double Layer System, Big Keyboard, 5-in-1 Digital Media Card Reader for SD, 802.11b/g/n WLAN, 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN, Bluetooth Feature, and six-cell lithium-ion battery for up to 6.5 hours of life. The notebook operates on Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) operating system.

External ports include 3 USB 2.0 port (1 distributed with eSATA), 1 little-display port, 1 HDMI port, 1 RJ-45 (network), 1 headphone out/microphone in combo jack and a Kensington MicroSaver lock slot. You see, this type of configuration is well enough for our every day use. People are very pleased with it.

As a high-designed notebook, the HP Envy 14-1260SE is good for gaming and entertainment purpose, the 14.5″ diagonal Hi-Def HP BrightView LED Display sports a 16:9 aspect ratio and it can present 720p HD content perfectly, this is great for watching movies. The graphics and processor are effective for playing almost any games. So I believe you'll love this HP Envy laptop, too.

So what do you feel about the HP Envy 14-1260SE Beats Edition Notebook?

How do I find Sata Ports?

Hey everyone,
I am wondering how to find out what the Port number is on my Sata ports. I have 4 internal ports and 1 external. I have a p5k deluxe board i believe. Any help is appreciated, thank you!
I know where to find the sata port, i need to find the actual port number of the port, it should be 4 characters (xxxx) I have checked msinfo32 and bios and my user manual i cannot find them. Please help

They should be those 0 shaped red and black ports on a motherboard. I would suggest connecting the sata port that has the lowest number next to it that isn't being used.

Shuttle XPC H7 5820S launched with ability to work with 16 displays at once (Slash Gear)

If you've been following along with Shuttle's ever-increasing library of mini
PCs, you know that they all look rather similarly simple and sleek on the
outside - today there's one with a feature on the inside that'll have your
sense of smallness blown out of the water. What the Shuttle XPC H7 5820S has
is [...]

Slash Gear

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