Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Hard Drive Review

Packaging and Accessories

As with the Intel X-25M we reviewed recently back, this drive is an OEM product direct from the manufacturer and as such does not come in a fancy box or have any accessories.

However, the packaging and box the Black did come in puts most e-tailer's OEM HDD packaging schemes to shame. The drive is suspended in the middle of the box (much like a retail optical drive would be shipped) in a antistatic bag with two large plastic end caps holding it securely in place. To this reviewer’s way of thinking this is the way ALL hard drives should come and really, really, really underscores what a class act Western Digital is. Needless to say our Black beastie arrived in perfect shape and ready to go!

First Impressions

On first blush the Western Digital 1TB Black looks a lot like darn near any other drive on the market. It is only when you pick up the drive do you realize that there is good bit of heft to this drive. Compared to the single platter WD 320GB we have in our Ye Olde Parts Bin or even the dual platter WD 640 Black it is certainly on the hefty side. This is to be expected as this is a triple platter drive and quite honestly, we all have become spoiled with ultra dense drives which only need 1 or 2 platters!


As is in keeping with the Black genre the label on this drive is white, trimmed with black. All the information you need to know is right here at your finger tips. The most notable information is the fact that this drive eats about 10 Watts of power a most. Of course, this is the max rated number and in practice it will use less than that. If you are like most consumers and you are replacing two older drives with one larger capacity Black 1TB drive, you will most likely see a net reduction in your power consumption.

Just remember, high performance parts usually come with a power consumption increase and if you are cutting your power requirements THAT close you are going to have bigger worries than whether or not your drive is “efficient” or not. Heck, ask yourself; if you were buying a McLaren F1 would really care about its MPG rating?


Before we move onto the PCB and its host of goodies lets quickly go over the features you can’t see…unless you crack open the case.


Let’s start with the more…mundane and work up from there. The top of this list is "NoTouch" technology. This is a fancy way of saying your drive heads never touch the platters and during shutdown automatically park themselves. Except for a few of us old timers, can anyone really remember having to manually tell their HDD to park the heads? It was a big deal back in the day…but now every drive does this. As for never touching the heads, it's the same deal; if your heads do hit the platter, “cow belling” will occur as the drive makes a very distinctive cow bell-like sound and is as good as dead. Technology like "No Touch" has been around for quite some time so don't let this fancy marketing jargon sell you on this drive; let its performance do the talking.


As this is an SATA-based drive, it does not come with the older Molex plug connector as should be expected on any modern HDD. The same goes for PMR or Parallel Magnetic Recording. All new drives have this technology and its what is allowing for such large drives with “only” 3 platters that still meet the 3.5" HDD standard size specification.


Moving on we come to StableTrac, which is nice to see in a 7200rpm drive. Just as their Raptor line and other manufacturer’s high speed drives (e. g. 10K and 15k SCSI units) have the need for the drive shaft to be anchored at both ends, so too does the Black. In this case it’s more for reducing vibrations, noise and increasing life expectancy than from any added stress to the assembly. This drive may not be the first with this technology but we are impressed to see this start to trickle down to the slightly lower performance drives.