HighPoint Rocket 620

This hard disk drive comes with a HighPoint Rocket 620 SATA controller, which supports Long LBA addressing, thereby allowing you to circumvent the 2.1 TB capacity limit of non-UEFI motherboards. You can attach the 3 TB Caviar Green to your motherboard's SATA controller - it will run normally, but you won't be able to access more than the first 2.1 TB.

The Rocket 620 has two SATA ports so you can hook up two hard disk drives to it. Its PCI Express 2.0 x1 interface is fast enough for a single 6 Gb/s drive, or two 3 Gb/s drives. However, please note that this card is the HighPoint Rocket 620, which looks identical to the RocketRAID 620 but is not RAID-capable. The easiest way to differentiate between the two cards is the lack of a buzzer on the non-RAID Rocket 620.

Here are the HighPoint Rocket 620's key specifications :

Installing the Rocket 620 and the 3 TB Caviar Green is very easy, especially if you are using Microsoft Windows 7. However, if you want a step-by-step guide, take a look at the 3 TB Hard Disk Drive Installation Guide. Windows Vista users, especially, should read that guide first.

Connectors & Jumpers

This is a Serial ATA hard drive, with native support for SATA 3.0 Gb/s. It is backward-compatible so you will have no problem using it with older SATA 1.5 Gb/s controllers. However, the faster SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface is necessary for optimal performance since this WD Caviar Green 3 TB hard drive has a large 64 MB buffer and boasts a maximum sustained internal (platter-to-buffer) transfer rate of 110 MB/s.

Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard disk drive to your PC while it's still running. To the left of the SATA connectors is the jumper block.

From what we can tell, Western Digital ships some drives with a jumper and others without a jumper. Since our OEM unit did not come with one, it is likely that only retail drives come with the jumper.

According to Western Digital, jumpering pins 1 and 2 enables Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC). Placing the jumper across pins 5 and 6 will force the drive to use the slower SATA 1.5Gbits/s (OPT1) transfer speed. This is only necessary for certain SATA controllers that do not properly implement the SATA 3.0 Gb/s speed negotiation, like the VIA VT8237 and VT8237R south bridge chips.

Although other Western Digital hard disk drives with Advanced Format Technology have an Adv Format jumper option, this particular drive does not. There is a very simple reason - this drive does not support older operating systems like Windows XP or Windows 98 because they do not support the GUID Partition Table (GPT) which is necessary to access the full 3 TB capacity. Therefore, there is no need for the Adv Format jumper option.

Breather Holes

The WD Caviar Green 3 TB drive does not have any clearly-marked breather holes on the top plate.

The underside has two breather holes (see picture on the right) near the top of the drive. These holes must not be covered.

Breather holes allow condensation inside the hard drive to escape. They also equalize the hard drive's internal pressure with the ambient air pressure. The hard disk drive needs them to function properly, so please make sure you do not occlude the holes!

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