Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive Review

A Few Features Under the Microscope

In a world where the “green” shift is becoming a hefty push, manufacturers are always looking for a way to increase efficiency while improving performance. Hard drives aren’t exactly the most power hungry components in someone’s system but if you have enough of them, they can draw enough power that their efficiency becomes paramount. In order to differentiate themselves from the competition, Western Digital has implemented some interesting features into this Black Edition drive.


Continuing this trend of increased efficiency, this model also comes with dual actuators (actually to be precise it is a dual stage actuator). What this means is the primary electromagnetic actuator moves the head and arm roughly into position and then a secondary piezoelectric based actuator located on the arm itself fine tunes the head positioning with 500nm precision. To put this another way the conventional actuator is responsible for moving the whole arm and the piezoelectric actuator built into the arm allows the head to swing back and forth within a five track band without the need to move the whole arm and does so extremely quickly.


Why is this new dual actuator important and why should you the consumer care? It is important because this one - two punch is actually faster than the older way of doing things and Western Digital claims a 0.4ms reduction in average seek times. This not only makes it faster but it should also be quieter and produce less vibrations while going about its job. If the seek time is reduced and the precision is increased this should mean that not only does the drive spend even less time “hunting” for the right track but it should also translate into lower random access times.

WD has also implemented their “NoTouch” technology. This is a fancy way of saying your drive heads never touch the platters and during shutdown automatically park themselves. Except for a few of us old timers, can anyone really remember having to manually tell their hard drive to park the heads? It was a big deal back in the day…but now every drive does this. On the other hand if your heads do hit the platter its called “cow belling” and the drive is toast as it makes that oh so memorable distinctive cow bell-like sound. Once again, this is a standard feature on most hard drives and it’s a lot like saying your brand new car came standard with seat belts and windshield wipers.


Next up on the list of features is StableTrac, which made its debut with the 1TB Black and it is nice to see that Western Digital has continued to use this in their 7200rpm drives. Just as their VelociRaptor line and other manufacturer’s high speed drives (e. g. 10k and 15k SCSI), high stress drives have the drive shaft anchored at both ends, so too does the 2TB Black. In this case it’s more for reducing vibrations, noise and increasing life expectancy than added stress as it is a 7200rpm drive and they have been getting by for a long while now with only one end anchored. This drive may not be the first with this technology but as we said we are glad that Western Digital has continued to include it in drives besides their VelociRaptor and SCSI model drives.

PMR or Parallel Magnetic Recording is another feature that all modern generation drives have and its what is allowing for such dense platters. One thing worth noting is this drive is probably the last SATA Rev 2.0 (3.0GB/s) drive Western Digital is going to make. We can say this with a certain amount of certainty as one of their main competitors Seagate has already come out with a SATA Rev 3.0 (6.0GB/s) 2TB drive. To us this is all marketing spin as hard drives are only now starting to saturate SATA 1.0 bus bandwidth with the only notable exception being burst speed, which we think is highly over-rated. SATA 6.0GB/s was specified more with SSDs and raid arrays than single hard disk drives in mind.