Caviar Black: WD's Performance 1TB HDD

Lawrence Lee · Post by **Lawrence Lee** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 7:31 pm

mattthemuppet · Post by **mattthemuppet** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 8:19 pm

I wonder with the advent of ever cheaper SSDs if WD correctly called the large storage market with the GP/green line and these large AND fast drives are out of touch? Looks like you don't get much more, other than heat and noise, over 5400rpm drives.

Hmm, 60GB SSD and 1TB GP drive would be schweet

bgiddins · Post by **bgiddins** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:32 pm

mattthemuppet wrote:I wonder with the advent of ever cheaper SSDs if WD correctly called the large storage market with the GP/green line and these large AND fast drives are out of touch? Looks like you don't get much more, other than heat and noise, over 5400rpm drives.

Hmm, 60GB SSD and 1TB GP drive would be schweet

I think you've hit the nail on the head - the only place for these drives is in consumer machines that only have a single drive with OS + data on the same partition, and even then the Caviar Blue fills that niche nicely. They're not an enterprise drive.

Personally my VelociRaptor will be replaced by a ~64GB SSD as an OS drive one day, couple with my existing 4 x 1TB Caviar Greens in RAID 5 for bulk storage. So it would seem coupling performance OS drives with bulk data drives is an emerging "standard practice" for savvy users.

I won't really be replacing the VR - just making it a data drive rather than OS drive, but for a home partition, not "archive" data.

Bakkone · Post by **Bakkone** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 1:30 am

Whats really interesting is how the 2TB GP drives that are released this week will perform.

ekerazha · Post by **ekerazha** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 3:06 am

Nice review, but a review of the Caviar Black 640 GB would be better. We all know the 1 TB, 3 platters version was loud, so I think a comparison between the 640 GB Caviar Black and the 640 GB Caviar Blue would be much more interesting.

Twigathy · Post by **Twigathy** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 4:45 am

YMMV... but I've had a horrible time getting my WD 640AAKS disks to work with any older (SATA 150) controllers. Even sticking a jumper over two pins to force SATA 150 mode still results in odd timeouts and disks dropping the SATA link. This is with an nforce3 board (So not new at all!), also tried with a silicon image controller (sii 3512) and an old RocketRaid card (RR 1640, I think).

Plugged them into ports on my new-ish P965 based motherboard and they work fine. Two of them are on JMicron 360 controller and the other two on the intel ports. Sadly that means my desktop has regained hard disks...

Why are there no not-silicon image PCI-e x1 SATA controllers which don't cost an arm and a leg?!

protellect · Post by **protellect** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 7:54 am

ekerazha wrote:Nice review, but a review of the Caviar Black 640 GB would be better. We all know the 1 TB, 3 platters version was loud, so I think a comparison between the 640 GB Caviar Black and the 640 GB Caviar Blue would be much more interesting.

I just bought one of these. So far, its a bit faster than my other 6400AAKS, and runs a degree or two cooler. The drives are right next to each other in the lower chamber of a P180.

I'm installing Windows 7 on it tonight.

I imagine that the 1TB version has similar performance, with a little more noise than the 640GB one.

Thanks for the review, I will post a HD Tune later today. I did it last night

ekerazha · Post by **ekerazha** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 8:33 am

protellect wrote: I just bought one of these. So far, its a bit faster than my other 6400AAKS, and runs a degree or two cooler. The drives are right next to each other in the lower chamber of a P180.

I'm installing Windows 7 on it tonight.

I imagine that the 1TB version has similar performance, with a little more noise than the 640GB one.

Thanks for the review, I will post a HD Tune later today. I did it last night

What about noise level of the Caviar Black vs AAKS?

colin2 · Post by **colin2** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 11:16 am

Thanks for a timely review. I've usually used smaller and slower drives including notebook drives, OTOH you need more of them.

Suppose you want 2TB of capacity for a 24/7 server. From a power/noise standpoint, what's the best combination of drives?

bgiddins · Post by **bgiddins** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 12:53 pm

colin2 wrote:Suppose you want 2TB of capacity for a 24/7 server. From a power/noise standpoint, what's the best combination of drives?

Wait a week or two for the Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green (looks like it is no longer vaporware). Single HDD, should be low noise like the rest of the GPs, high GB/W ratios for efficiency.

protellect · Post by **protellect** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 7:37 am

ekerazha wrote:
protellect wrote: I just bought one of these. So far, its a bit faster than my other 6400AAKS, and runs a degree or two cooler. The drives are right next to each other in the lower chamber of a P180.

I'm installing Windows 7 on it tonight.

I imagine that the 1TB version has similar performance, with a little more noise than the 640GB one.

Thanks for the review, I will post a HD Tune later today. I did it last night
What about noise level of the Caviar Black vs AAKS?

No discernible difference. But I don't have equipment to measure. I can't hear the seeks from a few feet away outside my P180

HD Tune Link.

C. Zoui · Post by **C. Zoui** » Sat Jan 17, 2009 2:58 pm

Lawrence Lee wrote:Our anechoic chamber became operational shortly after our last hard drive review. Some of the reference drives (the ones we still have access to) were re-tested in the chamber for airborne acoustics.

If SPCR pays shipping both ways, I can lend you my Samsung Spinpoint P80 w/ Nidec motor to re-test. If interested, email me at [email protected].

Caviar Black: WD's Performance 1TB HDD

Caviar Black: WD's Performance 1TB HDD

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