Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive Review

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read

In all three read tests the Western Digital 2TB Black easily beats every hard drive we previously have tested. The fact that this 7200rpm drive’s small file read speeds are nearly 29% better than a 10,000rpm drive is seriously impressive. Of course even the fastest hard drive is easily beaten by even the slowest of slow SSDs….but that is not really a fair comparison as they are different technologies and you are giving up speed for size and price per GB with an SSD.

Write

As is becoming one heck of an amazing reoccurring theme, this drive easily out-paces even the mighty VelociRaptor. Its 512kb test numbers are the best we have ever seen for hard drive OR SSD and the sequential numbers are in the top 5 as well. If Western Digital can ever figure out how to get a hard disk drive’s small file speeds up to SSD levels….SSDs may be in trouble,

Random Access Time

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive’s memory can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use "h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test" for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamut of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used "h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest". This tells the program to write all results in english, save them in drivetest txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).


As expected the VelociRaptor is still king of the random access numbers when it comes to hard drives. It’s simply a fact of life tha a 7200rpm drive is going to be slower in random access numbers when compared to a 10,000rpm one. However, this sub 10ms number is impressive and is actually a great improvement over previous generations of Blacks. It seems the dual actuator technology really does make a difference.