HDD by stefan @ 2013-02-06
The Caviar Black 2TB 7200RPM drive from Western Digital is a speedy HDD, which is offered with no less than 5 years of warranty and can be recommended with ease for storage on high-end gaming machines.
At first I would like to thank Western Digital for offering me a sample of their Black WD2002FAEX 2TB HDD for testing and reviewing.
"Western Digital is one of the world’s largest makers of data storage products – a data storage pioneer providing cost-effective storage solutions for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information.
WD is a global leader in the development and manufacture of hard drives and solid state drives for internal, external, portable and shared storage applications. WD hard drives are used in desktop and notebook computers, mobile devices, corporate networks and home entertainment equipment. WD solid-state drives are used in embedded applications such as network communications, industrial, medical, military and aerospace markets.
WD was founded in 1970 and began designing and manufacturing hard drives in 1988. Its storage products are marketed to leading OEMs, systems manufacturers, select resellers and retailers under the Western Digital and WD brand names. From its headquarters in Irvine, California, the company employs about 63,000 people worldwide at manufacturing facilities in California, Malaysia and Thailand; design facilities in Southern and Northern California, Colorado and Thailand; and sales offices around the world.
Products
WD serves desktop computer users with a wide range of 3.5-inch WD Caviar hard drives in both EIDE and Serial ATA interfaces for PC and Macintosh® computers. All feature cool, quiet, power-conserving operation.
A large family of 2.5-inch WD Scorpio hard drives is offered for notebook computing, also featuring high performance and low power consumption.
WD's enterprise storage offerings, including WD S25, WD RE and WD VelociRaptor lines, deliver the high performance, reliability and capacity required for servers, network attached storage devices, storage area networks, workstations, RAID servers, medical imaging, gaming and video/broadcast applications.
The company’s family of WD AV drives provides quiet, high-capacity, power-efficient video-streaming for users of digital video recorders and other home entertainment products.
WD external hard drives and storage appliances employ all the popular interfaces for network storage and direct attachment to computers. They are ideal for data backup, extra storage and offer plug-and-play convenience as well as the ultimate in pocket-sized portability of massive amounts of digital data.
WD’s family of SiliconDrive solid-state storage products, now in its third generation, offers a wide variety of capacities and interface options for superior performance and low total cost of operation. Uses range from the most sophisticated and demanding medical, military and aerospace installations to read-only applications in gaming.
WD enables content stored on hard drives to be more easily enjoyed with its entertainment products, including its DVR expanders and WD TV media players."
Maximum performance
Sophisticated performance enhancing features deliver the speed you need for demanding applications like photo and video editing and Internet gaming.
No compromises
High performance, high capacity, high reliability, and cutting-edge technology make up WD Black, the ideal drive for those who demand only the best.
Industry-leading warranty
WD Black carries the highest available warranty protection on the market, a 5-year limited warranty.
Dual processor
Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
Dynamic cache
WD's dynamic caching algorithm improves performance in real time by optimizing cache allocation between reads and writes. For example, if there's an overwhelming percentage of read traffic as opposed to write traffic, the drive automatically allocates more cache for read data, which reduces congestion and improves overall drive performance.
Rock-solid mechanical architecture
Enhanced reliability features help protect the drive and the data stored on it.
NoTouch™ ramp load technology
The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection in transit.
StableTrac™
The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations which enables consistently higher performance. (4 TB and 2 TB models only)
Tested for compatibility
We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab™ to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems.
The WD drive has been shipped in a bulk format, without any other accessories:
On the top side of the WD Caviar Black we can find a sticker with more information regarding the total drive capacity, the product code name, jumper mode specifications, serial number for warranty purposes, manufacturing date, power rating and more:
In the back we will find the pins for attaching a jumper in case we want to enable PUIS or limit the interface to 3Gbps, along with the SATA Data and Power ports:
Here are some extra views of the drive from the sides:
On the back we can see the small electric PCB with the cable that sends power to the motor:
The test bench was composed from the following hardware:
CPU: Intel I7 3770K @ stock
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Fatal1ty Professional
RAM: 4x8GB GeIL Leggera 2133MHz
Video: AMD Radeon HD 7970
Power Supply: Nexus RX-8500 850W modular
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11
SSD: Patriot Pyro 120GB
Case: Thermaltake Armor+ LCS, stock cooling
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
The drive does ship unformatted:
After the drive has been formatted here is the total space reported by Windows:
With AIDA64 Ultimate software tool, we can extract more information regarding the internal drive:
Extra tests:
In our home computers we often need more storage space for saving our precious photos, watching HI-Def movies or for installing the latest games, which are becoming larger and larger. If the drive is also speedy, we will see small speed boosts when loading applications. In the performed tests, the Caviar Black 2TB was trading punches with the Hitachi 3TB 7200RPM drive, which we think that is impressive.
The Caviar Black is supplied with a 5-year warranty, which is a very good thing since we have seen that a lot of manufacturers have decreased theirs to a 3-year period.
While the HDD motor is silent during IDLE, we should not expect quietness during seek; if we are planning to build a silent system, we would then recommend Caviar Blue or Green series, while sacrificing the read/write performance.
Overall, we would recommend this drive in gaming computers along with a speedy SSD to be used as a boot drive, or we can also save pennies by purchasing a smaller SSD, used for caching.
The Caviar Black 2TB can be found online for about 145 Euros.
I would like to thank again to Western Digital for making this review possible!