Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (WD1002FAEX) SATA 6GB/s Hard Drive Review

Caviar Black 1TB Overview
The Caviar Black 1TB drive looks just like any other SATA hard drive you have seen before, same 3.5-inch form factor etc.  You do notice when you pick it up it is quite heavy.  This drive is a double platter drive so expect it to be a little heavier than some of your older drives.  On the front of the drive you have a sticker will all of the information on it.  It tells us that this drive is the WD1002FAEX drive, it has a 1TB capacity, and 64MB cache.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (WD1002FAEX) SATA 6GB/s Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (WD1002FAEX) SATA 6GB/s Hard Drive

Flipping the drive over you can see the controller board and you have your SATA power and data connections and headers.  There is not a different SATA connector for a SATA 6GB/s drive.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (WD1002FAEX) SATA 6GB/s Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (WD1002FAEX) SATA 6GB/s Hard Drive

System Overview & Testing Procedures
Our test system is comprised of an Intel Core i7-965 Extreme processor, Gigabyte X58A-UD5 motherboard, Sparkle Calibre X480 GeForce GTX 480 video card, 6GB OCZ DDR3 memory, 750GB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive, 1000W Zalman power supply all inside the BitFenix Colossus case.

sys info

Opening up CrystalDiskInfo we can see all of the information on the drive and we can see that it is running at SATA 6GB/s speeds.

info

For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks as well.

– HDTune Pro (download)
– Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark (download)
– ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
– CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)

We also made these optimization changes…

– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enables in the BIOS
– Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
– Windows 7 power saving settings are disabled

For comparison here are our test drives.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (SATA 6GB/s)
Seagate Barracuda 1TB (SATA 3GB/s)
Samsung HD753LJ 750GB (SATA 3GB/s)

Now onto testing!

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