Thursday, 17 December 2009 09:31

Games Fusion reviews Western Digital's Caviar Black 2TB drive from their range of high-performance storage solutions aimed at workstations, multimedia PC's and high-end gaming rigs.

The WD 2TB Caviar Black was the first 2TB drive to be released featuring 7200RPM spin speed. For a while Western Digital had the performance edge until competing manufacturers, Hitachi and Seagate followed suit with the release of their 2TB 7200RPM drives. Seagate recently upped the ante with the introduction of their Barracuda XT 2TB drive, which features support for the new 6GB/sec SATA interface.



The WD 2TB Caviar Black features a 4-disk platform, each operating at a spin speed of 7200RPM. Performance conscious users will be pleased to know that the drive incorporates a dedicated Dual processor and a huge 64MB of cache. Western Digital's Dual actuator technology, exclusive to their 2TB drives, incorporates a head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data tracks. The drive also features Western Digital's new NoTouch ramp load technology, which enables the recording head to remain separate from the disk media. The result ensures significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Over the last twenty odd years the industry has seen little change in the way data is stored within computers. One noticeable change is the falling prices verses the amount of storage you can now obtain;  SATA drives have proven to be an obvious solution for those looking for a good combination of both performance and storage. Whilst Solid State Drives are an alternative, their current high market price and limited storage capacity over traditional drives makes them an impractical solution for everyday use.

With the increasing popularity of HD content comes the demand for higher-capacity storage, what was once a necessity for the professional market has now become a mainstream product. For anyone looking to build a media PC or high-end gaming rig these new 2TB drives should be a welcome addition.



Test System
Mainboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme
Chipset: Intel X58
Processor: Intel Core i7 920 @ 2666 MHz
Physical Memory: 6144 MB (3 x 2048 DDR3-SDRAM )
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
Operating Disk: 2x Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM Raid (149 GB)
Storage Disk: Western Digital Caviar Black (2000 GB)
Storage Disk: Western Digital Caviar (750 GB)
Storage Disk: Western Digital Caviar (750 GB)
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate Professional  x64
DirectX: Version 10.00
Benchmark Utility: HD Tune Pro 3.50

Performance
Thanks to its dual processor and huge 64MB Cache the WD 2TB Caviar Black performed well in our benchmark tests, not only outperforming our WD Caviar 750GB drives, but surprisingly also our raided WD Raptor drives. During our read benchmark test the WD 2TB Caviar Black archived a maximum transfer rate of 139.3 MB/sec, a minimum of 67.7 MB/sec and an access time of 9.6ms.



Noise Levels
The WD Caviar Black 2TB drive is an extremely quiet device. Having had initially ran the drive outside the case we found it barely audible, even at full operation. It's definitely one of the quietest drives we own and this should be a welcome addition to any media centre platform.

Temperature
Both idle and operating temperatures remained at a very acceptable level, with a peak operating temperature of just 32 degrees Celsius and a surface temperature of 40 degrees Celsius. This was a pleasant surprise as we expected the higher capacity and performance features would have had some detrimental effect on temperature levels.



Reliability
Western Digital are renowned for producing well-built, reliable drives and are used by many third party manufacturers, such as Drobo and Buffalo. From my own personal experience I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them on a reliability standpoint. Having said that other brands, such as Seagate and Samsung are undoubtedly equally as reliable. It's Western Digital's 5 year Warranty that just gives them that little bit of an edge above the competition.

The WD Caviar Black 2TB drive seems equally well built as previous products from the manufacturer. However, with such vast storage capacity comes greater potential to lose massive amounts of valuable data and we would recommend anyone with this much data to have a backup option at hand. Of course, two Caviar Black's would not be the most cost-efficient solution for mirroring data. We feel as a secondary backup device Western Digital's Caviar Green range are more than sufficient and are available at a fraction of the cost.

Conclusion
We found the WD 2TB Caviar Black to be an exceptionally high-performance drive and one of the fastest SATA drives that we have tested, whilst Solid State Drives clearly have the performance edge, SATA drives are still the preferred choice from a value perspective. There is much speculation that a 3TB drive will appear from the manufacturer in 2010, it will be interesting to see if they manage to achieve the same sort of performance with the higher-capacity model.

Based on the performance and Western Digital's track record for reliability we wouldn't hesitate to recommend the WD 2TB Caviar Black to anyone wishing to expand upon their high-end gaming machine, workstation or media PC. We award the WD 2TB Caviar Black 9 out of 10.