Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB

Nathan Edwards — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:30:00 -0500

Faster than a VelociRaptor, and six times the capacity

After months of making do with 5,400rpm and 5,900rpm 2TB drives and odd-bird 1.5TB drives, it’s finally happening: 7,200rpm two-terabyte hard drives are coming to rigs near you. First out of the gate and into our greedy arms is Western Digital’s 2TB Caviar Black, the performance cousin to the 2TB Caviar Green we reviewed in May. And brother, it’s just what we’ve been waiting for.

The 2TB Caviar Black is spec’d to impress, with four 500GB platters, two processors, 64MB of cache, and a dual-stage actuator system that puts a fine-tuned piezoelectric actuator head at the end of the standard magnetic actuator, enabling fine-tuned tracking for speedy seek times. The Caviar Black also comes with WD’s standard No-Touch ramp loader, so the read/write head never comes in contact with the platters, increasing the drive’s lifespan.

If this is the shape of 7,200rpm drives to come, we're wetting ourselves with excitement.

All these little extras add up, and the 2TB Caviar Black offers the speediest sustained reads and writes—exceeding 112MB/s each—of any consumer magnetic hard drive we’ve ever tested. That’s 15 percent faster than the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB’s read speeds. The 1.5TB Barracuda, previously our high-capacity speed champion, couldn’t keep up in sustained writes, either—here the Caviar was nearly 30 percent faster. And thanks to the greater areal density of the Caviar drive, its random-access read and write times are just 7.6ms and 5.0ms, respectively. You won’t find faster seeks short of a VelociRaptor or solid state drive. Of course, solid state drives offer the best performance—the $370 Patriot Torqx, our Best of the Best SSD, achieves sustained reads of over 200MB/s, sustained writes of over 175MB/s, and seek times measured in the tenths of milliseconds.

The 2TB Caviar Black has an MSRP of $300, the same price that low-powered 2TB drives like the Caviar Green and Barracuda LP debuted at earlier this year. Street prices, of course, will be lower, and keep falling—the first waves of 2TB drives, the “green” ones, are already selling for as low as $200. And the Caviar Black’s sustained reads and writes trump the fastest of those green drives by 20MB/s.

The 1.5TB Barracuda held a spot on our Best of the Best list for more than a year, but now it’s been firmly supplanted—the 2TB Caviar Black is officially our favorite hard drive.

Expect 7,200rpm 2TB drives from Hitachi, Seagate, and others in the next few months as well, with the aim of high performance. But if you buy a capacity hard drive today, next week, or even half a year from now, you can’t go wrong with this Caviar Black. It has the fastest sustained read and write speeds of any consumer magnetic hard drive we’ve ever tested. It’s faster in any benchmark than all standard hard drives save the WD VelociRaptor, which still holds the edge in burst speeds and random-access times—barely. Think about that for a second: You can get VelociRaptor-busting speed and six-and-a-half times the capacity for $300. We’re sold.

Western Digital Caviar Black

David Murphy — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:17:39 -0500

Storage always makes for a curious world. Western Digital's newest entry into the terabyte contest--it's second, if you count the company's Caviar Green drive--is geared for enthusiast performance. One look at the insides of this Caviar Black drive tells the entire tale. This is Western Digital's first three-platter terabyte drive, mimicking a move towards increased access speeds and areal densities that Samsung made some four months ago with its HD103UJ terabyte drive.

Due to the difference of time between the releases of the market's only three-platter terabyte drives, we expected to see the Caviar Black race past the Samsung and push the to very limits of modern-day drive performance. Western Digital will have to be happy with having its Velociraptor drive as the sole storage speed champion, because its Caviar Black does not surpass our reigning terabyte champion. Or rather, it does, but only in one of the four extensive benchmarks we ran on the drive.

It's fair to say that the Caviar Black and the HD103UJ are pretty much neck-and-neck in speed. On our synthetic HDTach benchmark, we saw differences ranging from 5 to 8 percent in average read and write speeds between the two drives, the winning numbers going to the HD103UJ. This performance difference dropped to 3 percent on our PCMark05 scores.

Western Digital boasts a 13 percent difference in IOPS (Input/Output operations Per Second) and a 9 percent difference in PCMark Vantage scores for its Caviar Black over the HD103UJ. We were a bit surprised by this number, so we fired up Vista on our test bed and loaded PCMark Vantage to see for ourselves. While the Caviar Black did pull ahead in this benchmark, it only surpassed the HD103UJ by a paltry 0.91 percent.

Still baffled, we ran the numbers using a new benchmark we've been experimenting with, h2benchw. It's a synthetic benchmark that measures a drive's synthetic performance in far more detail (and time) than HDTach, and we're considering adopting it for all hard drive measurements from this point forward. Running this program's bevy of tests, we watched the HD103UJ outperform the Caviar Black by 12 percent on its average random access times. More than that, the Samsung drive beat the Caviar Black in every single Read and Write transfer measurement--including all minimum, maximum and average speeds--as well as both read and write interface speed measurements.

Even with three of four benchmarks promoting the HD103UJ as the faster drive, we have one final measurement to take into account: price. Given their relatively close scores, we feel it's important to comment on the drives from a purchasing standpoint. The Caviar Black is coming to the market at an MSRP of $250. Even taking retail discounts into account, it'll likely hit close to the Deskstar 7K1000's street price of approximately $220. And yet, both of these drives are still far from the HD103UJ's street price, a crisp $185.

Other than that, the Caviar Black is fairly standard in its construction. It's a 3.0 Gb/s SATA interface with a 32 MB cache. Aside from a minor technological enhancement that parks the drive heads in a protected area, we're not looking at a new batch of wizardry when firing up this drive. We applaud Western Digital's achievement at making the world's second three-platter design for terabyte drives. But it's not the fastest. Even using the very Intel-based setup Western Digital based its numbers off of, the HD103UJ still trumped the Caviar Black in PCMark Vantage scores.

Even if its performance improvements seem negligible from an end user's perspective, the Samsung HD103UJ terabyte drive is still the best drive for its price and technology. But if you can get a Caviar Black on sale, you'll only be inches from the top of the performance charts.

Maximum PC caviar black RSS Feed

Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB

Faster than a VelociRaptor, and six times the capacity

Western Digital Caviar Black