Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB

[Rob Williams]

Kicking off our hard drive coverage begins with a look at Western Digital's Caviar Black 1TB. As an affordable "high-end" consumer drive, this model includes all of the important features, and performs quite well throughout all of our tests. It also happens to win the contest for having the lowest overall acoustic levels, and by a fair margin.

You can read the first of Bill's storage articles here and discuss it here!

 

[Doomsday]

Heey, nice review! i am thinking of buying a new HDD soon. I still run my OS on my old IDE Seagate 40GB which i bought in 2005 with my P4! lol! and its still running fine, no problems what so ever, for now atleast. Well i think this is what i will be aiming for when i buy a new HDD. Caviar Blacks r pretty good! as we dont have Seagate XT available here!

 

[2Tired2Tango]

Kicking off our hard drive coverage begins with a look at Western Digital's Caviar Black 1TB.

Nice review Rob....

I've been using WD drives by preference for a long time (mid-90s) and I've yet to have any problem that isn't one of abuse or age. In fact I have a late 1990s 20gb WD drive here that still works as good as the day it was made.

One thing I can confirm for you... WD drives are QUIET! Any seek noise they make is quickly drowned out by fans and typing. As a rule I end up putting my ear next to the drive to deterimine if it's spinning or not.

By contrast Maxtor drives me right up the wall... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ all freaking day long! Needless to say, I swap them out whenever I get the chance. Seagate (which owns maxtor) drives are only a bit quieter. Samsung are acceptable but you're gonna hear seek noise.

I'll take a quiet drive with a 5 year warranty over the most golly gee wizz bang new thang any day.

 

[Brett Thomas]

Bill and Rob did a great job with this one - I have to say, that's as thorough an HDD review as I could ever stand to read and not get bored. I definitely feel as I walk away from it that I know where this drive stands in the tested pack, and I might be picking up a couple of these for my home server - 3x2GB Raid 5 is a nice upgrade!

 

[Glider]

3x2GB Raid 5 is a nice upgrade!

You won't get far on 4 GB

 

[Rob Williams]

Nice review Rob....

This is Bill's article, not mine. I mainly just slaved over the graphs and editing ;-)

I'll take a quiet drive with a 5 year warranty over the most golly gee wizz bang new thang any day.

I tend to agree. The only thing better is an SSD so you'd get performance as well, but for obvious reasons, that's not a real choice for a lot of people right now.

You won't get far on 4 GB

Haha

 

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

Nice article however i wish to point out that the real competition on everyones mouth right now is the Samsung Spinpoint F3 versus the Western Digital Black Caviar.


The F3 is cheaper and outperforms the slightly more expensive Black Caviar. I think your article should mention this :/ Not to say that the Black Caviar is bad (it isn't). Just that comparing it to the competition, the F3 may be a better choice at the moment.

Source:
http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/624862-1tb-samsung-spinpoint-f3-vs-wd.html

 

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

By the way i own both of these hard drives

 

[Rob Williams]

Nice article however i wish to point out that the real competition on everyones mouth right now is the Samsung Spinpoint F3 versus the Western Digital Black Caviar.

Thanks for the heads-up! We'll be sure to get one of the F3 drives in and put it to the test as soon as possible