Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive Review

Manufacturer Product Page: WD Caviar Black 2 TB
Model Number: WD2001FASS
TechWiki Info: Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB - TechWiki
Price: Click Here to Compare Prices
Warranty: 5 years


It has been a little while since we looked at the state of Hard Disk Drives and while Solid State Disks do hog the limelight it is the venerable “HDD” that is the true workhorse of nearly every computer out there. Theses drives may not be considered “sexy” by many but the very fact that they are so ubiquitous is testimony to their staying power regardless of the assault SSDs have launched as of late. If you are going for price per GB, there really isn’t anything better than a good HDD to whet your storage cravings.

Western Digital really needs no introduction as they are one of the biggest and most highly respected names in the industry. Indeed, if you take a look around at any enthusiast forum you will see many, many people’s rigs sporting at least one of their storage products. In what can only be called a smart move WD has separated their 3.5” SATA 7200rpm internal drives into easily classifiable and recognizable sub niches. If you exclude their Blue line which has now almost been phased out, you are left with two main 7200rpm lines: the "Green" and the "Black". The Green series is their low power, earth friendly model line where low noise and low heat trumps shear speed but these attributes make for perfect data drives as they are quiet and draw less power. Then you have the Black Editions; these drives are all about speed and while they can be used as data only drives they excel at being your number one OS drive. Add in an industry leading 5 year warranty for the Black line (the same as the VelociRaptor's) and you have the makings of one awesome, “enthusiast grade” HDD.

Today we are looking at Western Digital’s latest offering: the WD 2TB Caviar Black. This amazing piece of technology not only has 64MB of on-board cache (double that of the 1TB unit we looked at awhile back) but also boasts a dual controller, dual actuator design. This massive drive is the largest capacity Black Edition drive listed on WD site and is starting to become available at retailers and e-tailers here in Canada with a price that is almost as big as the drive itself: $320. We know this drive will be fast but it should be interesting to see if this price (nearly three times that of the 1TB version) is justified in higher performance numbers.

Even though we will be including SSDs in this review, they are in-place for reference only since just like the Black will never be able to compete against an SSD on a pure performance level, and SSD can’t compete with HDDs in terms of value. All in all, this should make for a particularly interesting article.