[Kevin OBrien]

Western Digital already sells a wildly popular 3TB Caviar Green consumer hard drive. They've expanded their green drive offerings to introduce a version specifically for audio and video applications, including DVRs and video surveillance. Today we take a look at the new AV-GP 3TB and find how it's different than the Caviar Green it shares a bloodline with.

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[danwat1234]

I think if you do some testing, you'll find that the spindle speed is a constant 5,200RPMs.

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

If it was 5200 rpm, WD would be lying by saying "between 5400 and 7200 rpm". I guess it's rather a constant 5400 rpm.

Quote

The 3TB AV-GP is middle of the pack here, offering reasonably low idle power numbers. The good news is that the drive doesn’t have high or even above-average power consumption by any stretch of the imagination. It is noticeably lower than the company's own Caviar Green drives.

Only if you compare it to the older WD20EARS. THe current 3 TB Green has noticeably lower idle power usage and similar load power usage.

Overall I think the firmware tuning on this drive is impressive. I wish WD would offer owners of the regular desktop model the option to switch to this firmware. Never mind the idle power consumption in a desktop. And they could still charge more for the AV version due to extended warrenty (which they would have to provide in this case) and some 24/7-mumbling.

MrS

[danwat1234]

@ETA, you very well might be right. I compared the sequential transfer rate speed of this drive with some benchmarks of the Hitachi 5K3000, 2TB. Both have 750GB/platter, the 5K3000 2TB spins at 5,940RPM, but the STR speeds are very close to the same. So this Caviar green might be closer to 6,000RPM than to 5,000RPM.