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...