The Green Power line’s prodigiously low power consumption is achieved by dialing back spindle speeds, but that sacrifices performance, and it ultimately cost WD the title of fastest terabyte on the block. Somewhat surprisingly, Western Digital was apparently in no hurry spinning a terabyte up to full speed. Indeed, the new Caviar Black 1TB is the last 7,200-RPM drive to reach the terabyte mark, arriving a year after Hitachi broke the seal and well behind entries from Seagate and even Samsung.
So the black edition of the western digital series of HDD’s may be in trouble of the reproduction of the solid state drives that Intel and other Ram makers like OCZ and transcend are making in big progress in both performance in latencies; 0.1ms acquired score able to load most games in relatively short space of time and an above rating of 100mb/s read and write speeds able to show off that the old reliable HDD’s are in the heel of the new wave of storage solutions.
Western Digital recently juggled its hard drive naming scheme in an attempt to simplify things for consumers. On the desktop, GreenPower Caviar GP drives have become the Caviar Green Line. Caviar Blue drives fill out the middle of the range as mainstream products, while Caviar Black variants take over the high end. The Caviar Black, then, is Western Digital’s flagship desktop offering at 7,200RPM—the best of the breed, or so one would hope. Speaking of the VelociRaptor, the Caviar Black inherits one new trick from Western Digital’s 10K-RPM mini-monster. The Black features not one, but two processors, effectively doubling the horsepower it has available to calculate how to move, collect, and cache data on the drive.
Western Digital has kicked up the warranty coverage for its Black line, too. The drives are covered by a five-year pact that equals the coverage the company offers with its enterprise-class products (and the five-year warranty available with all of Seagate’s desktop drives). Rather than optimizing the Black for a single class of workloads, Western Digital aimed for strong overall performance—and it shows. While drives like Samsung’s SpinPoint F1 offer excellent sustained throughput but falter with more random workloads, the latest Caviar doesn’t skip a beat when presented with a mix of random read and write requests. The Black is the fastest terabyte drive we’ve tested in WorldBench, and it boots quicker than the competition, too. Sure, the SpinPoint scores higher in HD Tach’s synthetic throughput tests, but the Caviar is largely faster in FC-Test, which more accurately simulates real-world performance by running through a series of actual file creation, read, and copy operations. Overall the western digital black edition HDD is a high performance drive with respectable read and write speeds just over 100MB/s and incredible amount of space, able to be a good mark for HDD’s form the newer SDD’s.
