Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA Hard Drive Review

Usage
For a few benchmarks, I used HD Tune Pro and SiSoft Sandra on Windows XP 64-bit and good old hdparm on Ubuntu.

HD Tune showed an average transfer rate of 86.5 MB/s on reads with a 13.4 ms access time. The CPU usage time was quite low, too. Writes were high speed, too, averaging 83.9 MB/s with a 13.4 ms access time.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA Hard Drive

I also conducted the read test on my main drive (and one of the fastest around when I bought it 18 months ago), a 500 GB Samsung Spinpoint HD501LJ, and a secondary drive, a 160 GB Seagate ST3160811AS.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA Hard Drive

SiSoft Sandra showed similar results. The read drive index 76.75 MB/s with a random access time of 13 ms. The write drive index was 47.13 MB/s with a random access time of 16 ms.

The aforementioned Samsung drive read at 58.81 MB/s with 13 ms access time. The Seagate read at 46.03 MB/s with 17 ms access time.

Last, Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit, and most Linux distributions, includes a utility called hdparm for altering hard drive parameters. It includes a quick buffered read benchmark.

$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc:

Timing buffered disk reads: 308 MB in 3.00 seconds = 102.60 MB/sec

The Samsung read at 79.59 MB/sec and the Seagate at 67.16 MB/s.

Notice the extreme disparity between results for the WD. Note that I repeated these tests multiple times-the reported numbers are the approximate average of the results.

Final Thoughts
The WD Caviar Black 1TB hard drive has proved to be quite a quick drive. A quicker drive means faster loading of the operating system, programs, and games. Nothing is worse than waiting for your operating system to load when you first turn your computer on.

The price is right, too. The drive can be found for as low as $120 new, but usually around $150. ThinkComputers gives the WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA Hard Drive a 9 out of 10 score.

rating9 10 small

Pros:
– Speedy
– Inexpensive

Cons:
– Performance could be just a little better

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