Caviar Black: WD's Performance 1TB HDD

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Jan 14, 2009 by Lawrence Lee

Product	WD Caviar Black 1TB WD1001FALS-00J7B0 SATA 3 Gbps Desktop Hard Drive
Sample Supplier	Western Digital
Market Price	US$110-$120

What's black, blue and green all over? Westen Digital Caviar hard drives of course. Their Green Power line (aka Caviar Green) was a big hit in terms of power consumption and acoustics. The Caviar blue offers a mainstream compromise between quiet operation and performance. The third and final color, black, is reserved for their highest performance drives. The 1TB model we have in the lab today has only 3 334GB platters, putting it in direct competition with the Samsung F1 1TB. However, the WD Black has dual processors and is backed by a 5 year warranty. Does that give it the edge?

The Caviar Black 1TB is housed in a similar casing to the Caviar Blue 640GB.
Let's hope it's enough to keep the noise level down.

WD Caviar Black 1TB WD1001FALS (from WD's product overview)
FEATURE & BRIEF	COMMENT
Dual processor - Twice the processing power to maximize performance.	RAID, triple-channel memory, quad-core processors — it seems having one of anything is just not enough these days.
32 MB cache - Bigger, faster cache means faster performance.	Quickly becoming the new standard.
StableTrac™ - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations.	Vibration is often a problem with desktop-sized 7200RPM drives, regardless of platter size. Hopefully this feature will help.
NoTouch™ ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.	A very common technology migrated from the notebook sector.
Massive Capacity - WD Caviar Black SATA drives are available in capacities up to 1 TB.	1TB is now common.
Compatible - We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab™ and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems.	Odd. We didn't realize there was a big compatibility problem with SATA hard drives.

Specifications: WD Caviar Black 1TB
Specification	WD1001FALS
Capacity	1TB
Cache	32MB
Disks / Heads	3 / 6
Interface	SATA 3Gb/s
Spindle RPM	7,200 RPM
Data Transfer: Buffer / Disk	106 MB/s
Average Latency	4.2 ms
Weight	690 g
Power Requirements: Idle / Seek	7.8 / 8.4 W
Acoustics: Idle / Seek / AAM	24 / 33 / 29 dBA

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