What are technological limitations when you have history to make? That must have been Western Digital's controlling thought process when conceiving its latest Caviar Green drive.

Highest-capacity hard drive on the market

Slow for a 3.5-inch drive; Will not work in Windows XP systems; May require an adapter card; Cannot be used as a boot drive on most PCs

Mechanical hard disks are looking unfashionable these days as solid-state storage filters into the mainstream. But they're still much cheaper and can offer vastly greater storage capacities, as Western Digital's monster 3TB disk – the largest we've seen to date – demonstrates.

The fact is the drive is still alive after a long use as a storage drive (external), fast enough for USB 2.0 Transfer, not noisy at all..

Since today's multimedia files eat space faster than many realize, capacity has become the premier selling point for hard drives rather than shear speed. After all, when you are talking about a product that is bred for the highest amount of storage space rather than a drive that houses an OS and...

- While a good value it still is a lot of money for one drive, - Not recommended for an OS drive; Rather, wait for the Black version, - Only a 3 year warranty

Six months ago we took a look at a number of hard drives which included a bit of everything really. Some high end SSDs, budget models too. High performance mechanical drives and laptop models were included also.

That's a big chunk of change for 50% more capacity. You could purchase two 2TB drives for less than the price of a single 3TB unit. However, keep in mind that you'd also end up with twice the power consumption and twice the heat generation, so it might not be a good trade-off for small form factor...

Verdict: A top-notch drive that boasts superlative performance and an enormous amount of storage capacity.

Ever needed to store a few 100,000 photos on one hard drive? This could be right up your street.

Western Digital has both announced and started shipping their 5th generation Caviar Green hard drive. Of course the major highlight this time around is the monster 3TB capacity, a first for internal 3.5" hard drives. WD accomplishes this feat by leveraging Advanced Format and four 750GB platters.

Huge 3TB capacity; Speed increases over the 2TB model; Lower write; idle; and startup power consumption; As bleeding edge as it gets for computer storage for now

Compatibility will be an issue for some until systems meet UEFI standards; Significantly higher price per GB over 2TB model

"...be plenty. I've never used Western Digital before but had read good reviews and after Seagate drives failing one too many times I decided to go for this one. Firstly, it installed easily but that was to be expected.

Not as big as expected but still huge

Not as big as expected but still huge