Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Hard Drive Review

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XP Start Up / Adobe CS3 Load Time

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system "beeps!" and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's "day to day" OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.

OK, let’s face it, darn near ANY 7200RPM drive is going to be outclassed in this test by the SSD ilk, but the Black Edition 1TB still inches past its little brother; though we are more inclined to call this one a draw as it is well within our margin of error. In any case, this drive does not post terrible numbers, rather it’s up against the best of the best and thus small differences do make a big difference.

ADOBE CS3 LOAD TIME

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

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In the Adobe tests the WD 1TB Black does get awfully close to the VRpator’s performance level and once again it does inch past the 640GB version (though we are going to call it a draw once again). Honestly, it’s getting harder and harder to justify the added expense of the VRaptor when Western Digital's own “normal” enthusiast drives come so close to its performance.

 

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Real World Data Transfers

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.

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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.

 

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Value

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of this review.

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Wow, even though it has 50+% more capacity than its little brother the 640 (and as such as an increased price) this 1TB drive is still an awfully, awfully good deal! Good performance, great price, great capacity….what more could you ask for in a hard drive?!

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

We all know by now that SSDs seem to be the way of the future but for most of us, they are just not to the maturity level where they would be considered a viable alternative to a standard hard drive. Their prices are high and the storage capacity many of the less expensive SSDs offer pales in comparison to even the most basic spindle-based drives. Then there are those few standard HDDs on the market that make us want to forget the SSD phenomenon altogether and the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB is one of those drives.

There is a heck of a lot to like about this drive and very little to not like. As is customary lets do “good news / bad news”. When the tests were all run and the dust had settled we walked away very impressed with the power shown by the Caviar Black 1TB. As we said earlier in this review it is becoming harder and harder to justify the added expense of the VelociRaptor when WD is producing kick ass drives like this one. It’s very fast, very powerful and has a massive amount of room for your…ahem…video and picture collections.

To really get the absolutle best from this drive we would partition off 100GB to 150GB or so for our OS drive and leave the rest as a “D” drive (or use a really good defrag program often...and make sure our OS footprint was low via nLite/vLite). This would accentuate the already good performance of this drive and REALLY give higher end drives like the VelociRaptor a run for their money!

Unfortunately, the WD 1TB is a hot running drive, there is no other way of putting it other than to say that it also gives the VRaptor a run for its money in this area. For this reason we would have a hard time recommending it as an external drive…but with Western Digital’s Green line out there, there is really no reason to use the Black in that kind of application. Some people have stated that they found the WD Black series to be loud on idle and seek. We can honestly say that on our open bench setup with the drive less than a foot away from us, it was silent on idle but did produce a very nice rumbling growl when seeking. To us this is not bad as it is not as loud as any Raptor and if you place the Black in a good case it’s not going to be that big a deal. In fact, unless you are a real silent enthusiast this drive would be a better choice (from a noise envelope point of view) than the VRaptor. Just remember, the trick to keep any drive as quiet as possible is adequate vibration dampening as the enclosure / case is where most drive noise usually comes from.

If we had to summarize this drive in only one phrase that phrase would be “jack of all trades”. It’s not the best choice for every occasion but it certainly is right up there in darn near every category. If you need a fast, large drive and you do not care about heat output or a bit more noise than normal, the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB really should be at the top of your list. Proving that being the fastest isn't the only way to get to the front of the pack, we are proud to award this drive our Dam Good Value award. Congratulations, Western Digital!


Pros:
- Very good performance
- Large 1TB size
- Very reasonable price
- Great Jack of All Trades drive


Cons:
- A little loud on seeks (though not an overly annoying sound by any means)
- Latency

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