Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Hard Drive Review

Testing Methodology

Testing a hard drive is not as simple as putting together a bunch of files, dragging them onto folder on the drive in Windows and using a stopwatch to time how long the transfer takes. Rather, there are factors such as read / write speed and data burst speed to take into account.

For these tests we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HDTune, Cystal Disk Benchmark, h2benchw, SIS Sandra Removable Storage benchmark, and IOMeter for synthetic benchmarks.

For real world benchmarks we timed how long XP startup took, Adobe CS3 (w/ enormous amounts of custom brushes installed) took, how long a single 4GB rar file took to copy to and then from the hard drives, then copy to itself. We also used 1gb of small files (from 1kb to 20MB) with a total 2108 files in 49 subfolders.

While not completely necessary a hard format and surface scan will be performed on all Hard Disk Drives before testing. It may be old school of us, but this combination has proven invaluable in ferreting out bad hard drives before using them.

For the temperature testing, readings are taken directly from the SMART data recorded via Speedfan.

For all testing a Gigabyte PA35-DS4 motherboard was used. The ICH9 controller on said motherboard was used.

All tests were run 4 times and the average results are represented.

Processor: Q6600 @ 2.4 GHZ
Motherboard: Gigabyte P35 DS4
Memory: 4GB G.Skill PC2-6400
Graphics card: Asus 8800GT TOP
OS Hard Drive: 1x WD SE16 320GB
Power Supply: Seasonic S12 600W