Hard drives can be up to 3 TB of data into careful consideration, because they could not always work as expected. The round-up of four high-performance disks compares products from Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital, then cover their reservations.

The latest 3.5 “hard drives offer up to 3 TB of storage. WD Caviar Green was the first WD30EZRS, and now Hitachi and Seagate have competitive products added to their portfolios.

In this equation, we use the Western Digital hard drive against TB three competitors: two drive from Hitachi (Deskstar 5K3000 The Deskstar 7K3000 and HDS5C3030ALA630 HDS723030ALA640) and Seagate ST33000651AS Barracuda XT.

Of course, the labels on the 3 TB hard drives are impressive, but you have many computers that recognize and not be able to use the drives properly cautious. So that they perform as intended and specific platform decisions often requires a suitable operating system. And you can forget to use them as boot drives when they are not equipped with a UEFI motherboard.

Despite hurdles associated with this configuration (we will do together to overcome at some point, if we want to see more drives), 3 TB drives are still a very important pillar in the storage environment, at home or in business. SSDs are better than in many ways, but they are certainly not in a position to displace conventional hard drives when it comes to basic data storage. The high capacity, low cost per gigabyte and low energy consumption per gigabyte magnetic storage, the only sensible choice for backup, archiving, and user data.

Performance and energy saving

Our test candidates can be divided into two different camps. It is the Western Digital Caviar Green and the Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 WD30EZRS HDS5C3030ALA630 together. To translate their moderate speeds in a low power, moderate temperatures and low noise.

The second group consists of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 and Seagate ST33000651AS Barracuda XT. Its 7200 RPM speed promise a better performance. Energy saving is not the main focus for this, which is reflected directly in their somewhat higher power consumption.