Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive Review

A Closer Look at the Western Digital Black 2TB

Unlike previous models this Black edition drive does not exactly look like a generic drive. Sure it has the same form factor as previous models (or any 3.5” HDD for that matter) but this one has had a bit of a makeover in the looks department. Except for the more extreme measures (like the windowed version of the Raptor X for example) there really is not all that much you can do to make a drive look better besides putting a more fancy label on it. In the Black Edition’s case, it may only be a subtle addition of a black inlay to the top of the drive but that alone makes a huge difference and turns a “ordinary” drive into one with a bit of sex appeal.


Once you actually lift up this sucker you realize that it’s no lightweight. To get 2,000,000,000,000 bytes of data into this drive Western Digital had to use four 500GB platters. It actually seems we have become spoiled with lightweight drives like the dual platter Western Digital 640 Black or single platter 320GB Black.

Sine the density has increased to 500GB per platter, this should allow for even faster random access as the heads don’t have to move as much to read the massive amounts of data this drive can hold. Just remember, even though it is listed as a 2TB drive, your OS will only show it as approximately “1.81TB” drive. This is still an insane amount of storage space for one drive and really blows our minds at how much bigger these things are getting with every generation.


While the case of the drive has received a makeover, its data label is a standard white with black trim and a black font. All the information you need to know is right here at your finger tips. The most notable information is the power consumption seems to be around 0.6a off the 12 volt line (7.2 watts) and 0.45A off the 5 volt line (2.25 watts), for a combined total of 9.45 watts. This is over a full watt less than the previous Black model we reviewed which needed nearly 11W to get off the ground. Honestly though, unless you are running huge arrays in a dara center configuration, an extra watt or two is not a big deal even though every enhancement does count.