Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive Review

IOMETER

IOMeter is heavily weighted towards the server end of things, and since we here at HWC are more End User centric we will be setting and judging the results of IOMeter a little bit differently than most. To test each drive we ran 5 test runs per HDD (1,4,16,64,128 que depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 8 subparts were set to run 100% random, 80% read 20% write; testing 512b, 1k, 2k,4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 8 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 8. This gives us an average score for that particular que depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.


Well….ummm, that’s not that helpful now is it? SSDs are just so much better that they really are in a league of their own and have a tendency to compress ALL hard drive results into a smudge at the bottom of the chart. Let’s yank all the SSDs and see what the various hard drives can do.

Hard drives only

Now at least we can see what the various hard drives have to offer on this tough test. As expected the VelociRaptor’s 10,000rpm speed advantage is just too great for any 7200 rpm drive to overcome. However, this advantage is getting smaller and smaller with each successive Black series revision. The Black 2TB is once again MUCH improved and easily outpaces even the 640GB Black model. You have to be impressed with performance numbers like that.