Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Hard Drive Review

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in "real world" situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containg 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.


Here is where the added platter comes in handy as it not only beats the 640GB version, but also comes close to (or actually tying in one instance) the much more expensive Velociraptor! What’s even more interesting is the “copy to itself” test numbers are much better when it comes to small chunks of data than its own “Copy to” performance results. It’s obvious that the dual brain Marvell chip with built in cache does make a difference and is not just marketing hyperbole.