Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive Review

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XP Start Up / Adobe CS3 Load Time

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.

 

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Real World Data Transfers

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in "real world" situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containg 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.

We were hoping this drive would some good performance numbers and boy we weren’t disappointed. It not only beats previous Black generations like they owed it money but it even knocks out the VelociRaptor…in each and every test.

 

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Value

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of their initial review.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/WD2TB/BLACK_2TB_value.jpg" border="0" alt="" />​

There is now denying it, this is NOT a cheap 7200rpm drive. If you consider value to equal price per GB, there are much better alternatives out there. This is perfectly reasonable if all you want is a data storage device and performance is really not an issue. However, if you take into consideration that this drive not only out performs a VelociRaptor but offers MUCH more storage space while doing it….things become topsy-turvy. Heck, this drive can be considered a downright bargain when you look at performance + space vs. price. It really does depend on what you are looking for in a hard drive and we can only say that this drive is impressive in many ways, but like most high performance machines: increased performance comes with an increased price tag.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

What can we really say? Western Digital 2TB Black is the epitome of excess from every perspective: its size makes nearly every other drive look inadequate, its performance is simply off the wall and it costs a fortune compared to less worthy drives. To say we like it a lot would be putting it mildly.

When we first heard about the “dual actuator technology” it seemed like nothing more than some new marketing spin and was just a mere marketing phrase added in to help this Black Edition drive stand out in a highly competitive market. After seeing it in action, we’re happily converted to the dark side and can say for a fact that this is not just PR fluff, but something that actually helps performance while lowering vibrations and noise. This drive is still not what you would call “silent” as it does rumble and grumble during high loads, but its acoustical footprint is much smaller than that of the VelociRaptor (which we find has an annoying whine to it even during idle times) and to our admittedly untrained ears it is not as loud as the 1TB Black.

To our way of thinking, any drive which can not only beat the VelociRaptor in speed, noise and value has to be one heck of a product. Now that is not the same thing as saying it’s a great value as the Black Edition drives are known for pushing high price points. However, with time and even more competition from the likes of Seagate and SSDs, we are sure this only real weakness will be alleviated. Actually, the other weakness this drive has it is simply too good to be relegated to storage. Inside the 2TB Black beats the heart of a main boot drive and it is almost a crying shame to use it as only a data storage device. With that being said, it does make an awesome storage device as it is as massive as it is fast….but it still is a crying shame to only have it as a “D drive”.

After working with a lot of SSDs we can honestly say this is the first Hard Disk Drive that we would even entertain the thought of using as our main drive. We’re an elitist lot aren’t we? In fact, if you portioned off the first 200GB or so of the Black 2TB the resulting “C Drive” would be a force to be reckoned with even against SSDs.

We can go on and on about how good this pricey drive is, but in the end we think that the best thing we can say about is we have never loved a hard drive as much. If you are looking at the VelociRaptor and can justify $300 for a hard disk drive, yet don’t want to leap onto the SSD bandwagon until it proves itself a bit more, THIS is the drive you want. Seriously, forget about the VelociRaptor line and spend your hard earned dollars on the Western Digital 2TB Black. We’re still pulling our jaws off the floor at its performance. For that and so many other reasons, it receives out Dam Good Award.


Pros:

- Best in class performance
- HUGE 2TB size
- Beats even the VelociRaptor in most performance tests
- Improved Latency

Cons:

- Louder than most non Black drives
- Price
- Will make you regret previously spending the coin on a VelociRaptor (like we did)

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