(Old Model) WD Green 4TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5-inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, IntelliPower, 64MB Cache WD40EZRX

I purchased two of these drives in September 2011, and I could not be happier with them. I have great luck overall with Western Digital disks, and these drives are no exception. One was purchased here on Amazon, and another was purchased at a local electronics shop. Both have not given me any problems.The rotational speed of the drive is, for some, a limiting factor in its deployment settings. I have both disks installed in an old 2003-era Power Mac G4 tower, connected to two Sonnet TSATA PCI cards, and when formatted correctly, work very well and recognize their full capacity in my setup. Due to the space limitations of the older Apple Partition Map (APM) formatting scheme, they must be configured as GPT (GUID Partition Table) and therefore cannot be used to boot the computer, even though the Sonnet SATA cards do support booting to connected drives. I use smaller SATA disks (2TB and under) for booting purposes since they can be properly formatted using APM.Running in OS X 10.5.8, the drives recognize all 2.7TB of formatted capacity, and do a very admirable job of acting as my data repository. If I recall correctly, RAID is not recommended with this model 'Green' drive due to the power saving logic, so I use a program to copy, every 6 hours, from the primary storage disk, to the other. This has the added benefit of avoiding filesystem corruption if one drive starts to go south. Luckily, that is not the case.Performance for copying over 1TB of data from the old SATA disk to the WD 3TB green drive seemed pretty close to the 1.5Gbps interface speed of the SATA card, which was simply amazing on this old G4 tower. I don't regularly access the machine, and most file transfer is done over my home network, so the disks aren't used as primary storage. The speed, though, is not noticeably slower than the other 7200RPM SATA disks (one Seagate 1TB and one Hitachi 2TB) I have installed in the machine. This phenomenon is likely due to the SATA 1.5Gbps interface of the card being the primary bottleneck, not the rotational speed of any of the disks involved. I have not run any quantitative speed testing on any of the disks as I have not noticed any issues with performance in my current setup.I am very happy with these disks and their compatibility with my old, creaking setup. I feel good knowing that if the G4 tower ever goes south, I can readily move them into a Mac Pro tower with ease. I was skeptical that investing in a SATA setup for my old machine would be worth the cost. I now believe that for its purpose as a local network storage device, and not as a daily use machine, these drives are probably among the best for this kind of setup regardless of the platform you'll be deploying on (assuming your setup with work with 3TB disks).One note is that (as of early November 2011) the prices of the 3TB Green drives have more than doubled since I purchased them, likely due to flooding in Thailand where most hard disks are produced these days. It may seem vulgar or insensitive to discuss storage pricing when so many peoples' lives are devastated by this horrible disaster, but this is a product review, so I mention it with as much context as I can. I could not personally justify a purchase at the current price level, but if you need 3TB of storage in one disk mechanism, I believe you can acquire this drive with confidence assuming the cost does not prevent you from doing so.

I have a total of seven of these drives between 6 on a raid array on one PC and one as a data drive (non raid) in another PC.They are slower at RPM speed than some other drives, at 5400 RPM so if you are someone who "needs" a 7200 RPM drive then you do not need this.They are however the CHEAPEST, MOST RELIABLE CHEAP drive out there. Unlike some brands who will sell you a 5400rpm drive for this, or the various drawbacks from externals, this drive is inexpensive, not annoying in its "green" power management (or needing to have it shut off) and its fast, I get good speed in my 6gb/sec Sata3 port, and overall think its great that for this price, I get a drive with a 3 year warranty, reasonably fast transfer rates despite a lower RPM (RPM is not everything apparently) and its a Western Digital (and not lower on quality) for the price.Western Digital have been reliable drives for me, for many years. I have some going back as far as 8 years old and still running (that does not mean one has never died) but it's not common. It's more common that the storage size becomes too small for me and gets it shelved than the drive fails.I am optimistic by the early performance of these Caviar Greens that I will continue to use these for a 3tb drive. For 2tb drives I prefer the Caviar Black (which is not made in 3tb size). I was apprehensive to go to another brand, so chose WD's lower line rather than risk a brand who has not performed well for me for years.Five stars are for the value, and the fact it delivers. I would like to see a 7200rpm 3tb from WD someday come around, such as a Caviar Black 3tb, but until they do, I am happy to buy these, despite I usually buy the Blacks (I do need bigger than 2tb occasionally) or like for my raid array which runs 6 3tb caviar greens, wanted the array to be bigger then 6 2tb blacks would achieve.Buy this drive with a clean conscience, it will work for you, and work well. I never have had a DOA from WD, I am sure it happens, but I have 6 pcs, and for that to never have happened, is great.WD! Caviar! and this time GREEN ain't that bad.In fact for its price, you cannot beat it.