Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Hard Drive Review

HD Tach v3.0.4.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Western Digital 2TB Green Hard Drive:

Western Digital 3TB Green Hard Drive w/ Marvell Driver 1034:

As you can see something is up with the Marvell 9123 controller on our ASUS P6X58D motherboard here on HDTach. We upgraded to the latest driver on the ASUS website and ran it again as 38MB/s write speeds aren’t going to fly.

Western Digital 3TB Green Hard Drive w/ Marvell Driver 1036:

The Marvell 9123 controller with WHQL driver 1036 performed better than 1034 and you can see that the average read performance went from 38MB/s to nearly 63MB/s.

Western Digital 3TB Green Hard Drive w/ Marvell Driver 1042b:

After some searching online we found Marvell 9123 controller beta driver 1040b and while we were able to install it, we were no longer able to run the write test in the benchmark for some strange reason. The average read score was very strange in this benchmark, though, as it was nearly flat now. As you can see, what driver you run on the Marvell 91XX series of controllers can greatly impact performance, so be sure to do some testing to see which performs the best for you on your particular system.

Benchmark Results: HD Tach is starting to get rather old and is in need of an update. This benchmark was created back in 2004 and during that time drives were writing in 512-byte sectors not 4KB and drives back then were nowhere near 3TB in capacity.