Hello all. I am interested in the WD Caviar Green 3TB HDD to extend my new assembled Desktop Pc storage capacity. However, I am a bit concerned that it may not work properly, for during the initial Pc setup I could not install an older WD Caviar Green 1TB HDD. Indeed, when it was connected to the motherboard Windows 7 took ages to start (15 to 30 minutes!) and under Device Management I was not able to get the new drive recognized (only the Bios listed it correctly) and initialized. As far as I know, the older Caviar Green drive differs from the newer model only for the cache size (32MB vs 64 MB). The older drive is also not formatted, for I removed it from my older Desktop Pc and I want to keep the data. I suppose the newer Caviar Green HDD should install fine, but am interested to hear your experience with it. Another aspect I am a bit concerned about is the 5400 RPM speed, which would be fine for simple storage but perhaps is not that good if I need to play or edit the files without moving them to the quickest drives (I have already installed an SSD as main drive plus a WD Caviar Blue 1TB HDD). Most of the files I’d like to move to the 3TB Caviar Green are untouched .avi family videos as big as 13 GB per hour, which is probably not that much for modern standards but still makes them quite big. With the HDDs already installed I handle them fine (I also have 16GB of RAM installed and a graphic card with 3GB of dedicated memory). Any suggestion will be welcome. I am not in a hurry anyway. Thanks all in advance.
Green drives are great, but you need to remember their limitations. I would not use one for editing of any kind, let alone as a system drive; I would only them for storage. It would be okay to store files on them and transfer those files back and forth for editing. Also, they are designed to spin-down after a short interval, so there will often be a delay after double-clicking on files as the drive spins-up.
The 15 to 30 minute delay you mentioned is not normal. I just guessing here, but I wonder if the Green drive had no letter associated with it and that’s why Device Management could not deal with it. Do you have an external dock in which you could give it a quick format?
