Saturday, 30 October 2010

Western Digital Caviar Black Hard Drive Review

I purchased the Western Digital Caviar Black as an upgrade over an older IDE drive. I chose the Caviar Black as it has better performance than the Caviar Green and Caviar Blue. I installed the drive with a Foxconn A6VMX motherboard and an Athlon 64 x2 5600.





Specs
Storage Ammount: 500, 640, 750, 1000, 2000
High Speed Cache: 32mb (64mb on only 2tb model)
Processor: Dual Processor (Allows for more data to be transfered quicker)

Quality
This hard drive seems to be very well built. It is heavy and has a very strong metal top and strong metal sides. This is a very positive thing for a hard drive as sometimes people knock them when trying to install them. It is built well and feels very sturdy.

Performance
I have had this hard drive for about 2 months now and in the time I have had it I have seens a very good increase in performance over an older Samsung F1 IDE drive. I did a few performance tests and these are the results;
  • Random Access: 12.3ms
  • Average Read: 78mb/s
  • Burst Speed: 220.4mb
As you can see from those results this hard drive has very good performance. These are the performance figures on the well known Samsung Spinpoint F3
  • Random Access: 13.8
  • Average Read: 124.8
  • Burst Speed: 258.9
As you can see. The Western Digital Caviar Black struggles to keep up with the F3 drive. I do however think that me having it partitioned into 3 peices and have a full XP install and loads of programs probably lowered it chances against the F3 so I would add a little performance to each of the Caviar Blacks results.

Noise and Temperature
This hard drive is very quiet for a performance drive. It isn't audiable at all over the noise of my fans in my computer. It does also stays very cool with temperatures ranging in my setup from 29c-34c. This is easily cool enough to help it continue working correctly for a long time.

That is all for this review,
Jack-O-Bytes

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