Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Hard Drive Review

First Impressions Con't

Like many other newer drives, this HDD does not rely on attached cables to move data and power from the PCB and drive (and vice versa); rather it relies on perfect placement for the spindle power connections (the four hard points near the orangeish cable in the above picture) and a multi prong data port similar to what is seen in laptops to connect the SATA drive to the motherboard. This really is a nice step up from the old way of doing things as those old school ribbon cables were a real pain to stick back and were very delicate. To ensure proper alignment there is two small plastic posts which have accompanying holes in the PCB.


We now come to the really interesting technology the Black Edition 1TB has and luckily these tech pieces are easily visible….as long as you are willing to remove the PCB that is. When we took a look at the PCB the very first thing which stands out is the lack of a Cache chip (you can see where it “should” be in the upper right corner of the PCB in the above picture). Instead of having a separate 32MB chip, these drives come with integrated cache which means the dual processor chip has 32MB of cache built right onto its die. This certainly will reduce internal latency and should also help with the copy from and too it self tests later on.


The processor which is the brains of this drive is a Marvel 88i8845E dual processor System On a Chip (SOC). There is very little known about this chip but this is par for the course with Marvell. We can make a few educated guesses about it like the fact that we would be surprised if unit was based off of Marvell’s latest flagship series of Sheeva ARM processors. This is because the Sheeva is a brand new chipset and this chip was made in 25th week of 2008.

Our best guess is the 88i8845 is more likely to be a dual core Feroceon (or other variant) ARM based SOC. In either case, this chip comes with what ARM refers to as “TCM” or Tightly Coupled Memory (or as it is commonly referred to as “On Die” memory), as we said earlier this should help reduce latencies and make it a much more efficient setup. It is also interesting to note this is the E revision of this chip and early Caviar Blacks (though in smaller sizes) came with D revisions. All in all it’s a fast, powerful and small chip which should easily help increase the performance of this hard drive.


The Motor Controller on the WD Black is made by STMicroelectronics and to be precise this is a SMOOTH L7251 2.2 controller chip. In a nutshell if the Marvell is the “brain” of this setup then this chip is the central nervous system. It is responsible for governing darn near everything related to mechanical and electronic power functions of the drive. In many cases this is the one piece which gets overstressed and dies or takes the “ripple” (AKA power fluctuation) from an overstressed PSU and burns out; and is why swapping out the PCB of many “dead” drives will resurrect them. All in all, it’s an important piece of silicone to say the least.