Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive Review

Real World Performance

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. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.


We actually had to rerun this test quite a few times to make sure that we hadn’t messed them up as this 2TB Black blows away its predecessors by 10 full seconds. This is very, very fast folks.

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.


While the increase is not as visceral as it was with boot times….the Western Digital 2TB Black is one beast when it comes to loading applications. It is fast, it is big and it is a great improvement over previous models. Once again it ties the venerable X-25M in load times and this to us proves that it's XP load times were not just a fluke.