The 3.5” drives offers improved reliability over traditional hard disk drives, has lower power consumption and is some of the largest SATA drives we've ever seen. The new drives are especially important for audio-video (AV) uses as they can be used in digital video recorders, video surveillance, single-drive media servers and external multimedia storage.

“Designed to go the distance in high-temperature, always-on streaming digital AV environments, WD AV-GP drives store more hi-def audio and video than ever before with our new 2.5 TB and 3 TB versions,” said Jim Welsh, executive vice president of WD's branded products.

The WD AV-GP family of drives delivers outstanding reliability along with power-saving WD GreenPower Technology. The WD AV-GP drives are field tested to have a 1.0 million hour MTBF rating. Drives with capacities in excess of 2.19 TB currently present barriers for certain PC hardware, firmware and software though.

For example, drives larger than 2.19 TB are not supported by systems running Windows XP; and systems with 32-bit versions of Windows Vista or Windows 7 relegate drives larger than 2.19 TB to be used as secondary drives. Thus, it is important to review existing PC specifications prior to installation of either the 2.5 TB or 3.0 TB WD AV-GP drives.

"Combine unsurpassed capacity, power-saving WD GreenPower Technology, and performance capabilities to capture up to 12 simultaneous HD video streams with SilkStream technology and the drive choice is made clear in optimising AV applications like PVR/DVR, IPTV and video surveillance,” concluded Welsh.