Western Digital Caviar Green WD30EZRSDTL 3TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Pros: Capacity is nice. Drive is relatively quick.

Cons: I used this drive for less than three months and a hardware failure occurred. Thankfully I have the data backed up, but really??? Three months??? That's a lot of data to retrieve. I will have a hard time trusting the replacement drive when it arrives from Western Digital.
In addition, I planned on using this drive with my Netgear Stora, but a significant number of devices cannot recognize this drive because of its size. This is not the fault of WD, but is a factor to consider before you purchase. Check compatibility and be sure to back up your data!

Other Thoughts: The drive was used in an office environment, with proper ventilation, never dropped or bumped. I had no warning it was ready to fail. I will be sticking to 2tb drives for a while. And I will be buying a different brand from now on. Out of the 6 or so WD drives I've purchased, three of them developed hardware problems within one year of purchase.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the WD Caviar Green, as this is not the typical experience with the product. We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a NewEgg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: Easy set up, works like a charm and its pretty much what I needed for storing videos and photos

Cons: None right now

Pros: Can't ask for more from a storage drive, it's quiet, fast, and holds lots of data!

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: On Windows 7 SP1 64-bit, I had to update to the newest Intel RST drivers in order to get this to work without the included HBA card. If you have an Intel RAID I would recommend running the Intel Driver Update Utility to verify you have the newest RAID drivers installed. Anything below Intel RST 10.6.0.* you will need to use the HBA card because the Intel drivers before this could not detect the full 2.7 TB inside Disk Management. If you happen to be using the HBA card and you're just adding the drive for storage, you will need to change the drive boot order in the BIOS to boot off your original drive.

Pros: Tons of storage, seems reasonably fast for my purposes. The stream movies just fine from my new media server.

Cons: Not sure where the problem lies, but these drives were not recognized on the SATA controller onboard my new SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O motherboard. Once I used the included RocketRAID HBA they worked great. HBA was picked up and driver loaded automatically with Windows Server 2008 R2. Not sure why a brand new UEFI motherboard would not recognize the drives. Also had minor problem getting the HBA to let system boot, just had to switch slots.

Other Thoughts: Great drives, wish they worked off the onboard SATA controller though.

Pros: Quiet, cool, sufficiently fast. I did my homework and read most newegg reviews on this drive before purchasing it, and my upgrade went smoothly - installed drive with controller, formatted partition table as GPT, quick-formatted - few minutes later I had additional 2.7 terabytes of disk space to spare.

I have somewhat old (circa 2006) AMD computer running 32-bit Windows 7.

Cons: None to me.

Other Thoughts: HDTune shows write speeds 80-120MB/s for this drive, which is faster than half of hard drives in my systems, so I consider it as a perf upgrade, too. I don't plan to use it as boot drive.

Pros: Install Intel 10.5.0.1027 and everything works fine. Once intel gets off their bumms and updates the actual BIOS to 10.5.0.1027 for RAID everything will work just fine but for now I'm going to have to settle for Software RAID

Cons: Settling for Software RAID

Pros: Works great! 3Tb(3,000,457,224,192 bytes/2.72TB). Biggest drive I own. I own 3 2Tb drives, and 3 1Tb drives as well :D

I'm strongly considering another. I like data redundancies...

Cons: Umm... sorry, can't think of any :p WD Rocks!!! I find it unbelievable that soo many people have trouble with green drives, and yet I've never seen a bad one.

Still no petabyte drive??? :S

Other Thoughts: I did research before I purchased. So, I am aware that most current motherboards DO NOT support these drives properly. Which is why the 2 port S-ata card accompanies the drive. The card can recognize the drive, most motherboards cannot(Properly). I still consider it plug and play for windows 64bit(GPT) .

Pros: For the moment, a huge amount of storage for my backups. Working fine attached to my ancient and el cheapo Promise PDC40718 (PCI) (I didn't use the included controller as my motherboard isn't equipped with PCI Express slots.) I always run the manufacturer's diagnostic utility on a new drive to check for out-of-box failures and this one passed, like most do.

Cons: None. Unless you're looking for a speed demon, then you'd be looking at a Caviar Black or a SSD.

Other Thoughts: Ignore most of the negative reviews of this drive - the problem is usually with the user or the computer that this drive is being hooked up to.

This thing requires a little patience to get working if you're unfamiliar. I have this attached to a server running Ubuntu 9.10, so I don't have any advice for Windows users. For Linux users, you have to use a utility like parted to create a GPT partition table (or, as is the parlance, 'disklabel') If you search for something like 'linux gpt partition table', you should get links to some step-by-step tutorials.

These are a deal at the moment, and ever since Seagate absorbed Maxtor's shoddy processes, WD is the only drive manufacturer I still trust to make quality products that aren't constantly plagued by failure (July, 2011).

Pros: Big, low power consumption.

Cons: Slower than a standard hard drive. Load cycle count increases about 20 per hour, which gives it an expected lifespan of only 15,000 hours.

Other Thoughts: I recently installed two of these drives as a RAID1 in Ubuntu, and so far I've had no problems; Ubuntu recognised the included SATA controller and while I had to leave it overnight to build the RAID array it was copying at 60-100MB/sec which is pretty good for a 'Green' drive.

Pros: I bet it would be awesome! But .....

Cons: The drive is no doubt fine but many interfaces cannot support above 2 TB. I have a Mac and it can but the Voyager external mount with FW 800 I use can't!