Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and the main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.


While its burst speed is slightly lower than a VelociRaptor’s numbers, the real standout in is the fact that this 7200rpm, drive beats the VRaptor in average speed. Heck, we bet that if you short stroked the 2TB Black down to 300GB (like the VRaptor) it would eat its smaller brother for lunch. If this is a sign of things to come….WD may have just made the Raptor line redundant.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.


These are som scary good numbers. This truly is the first 7200rpm hard drive we have reviewed which beats an award winning SSD. Lets face it, the X-25M is no slouch yet it and the VelociRaptor lose in the average read speeds to this new Black drive. The minimum number may be slightly lower than that of VRaptor but in our opinion a little less than 2MB/s reduction in minimum speed for 1700GB’s of extra space sounds like a pretty good trade-off to us.