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WD Caviar Black drives combine a high performance electronics architecture with a rock solid mechanical architecture to deliver the perfect storage solution for your fully-loaded PC or maxed out gaming machine. Cool drive operation, no-touch head technology, and leading-edge vibration protection ensure enhanced reliability and sustained data throughput.It's ideal for power computing applications such as multimedia, video and photo editing, and maxed out gaming computers.
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Technical Details
- SATA 7200 RPM 3.5INSee more technical details
By James T (Amherst, MA USA)
I just received a pair of these drives, and it would appear Amazon has corrected the shipping problem (ar at least this time it was done right ;-).The drives were double-boxed, with the drive inside the inner box wrapped in bubble wrap. The drives arrived in perfect condition.
By Wavey Davey (Southern CA, USA)
I have been waiting to review my six (6) WD Black 1TB 32MB Cache SATA 2 HD's because I wanted to establish a track record with them, a baseline, since I am using them in two distinctly different RAID mediums. In any case, the SATA HD's are working fantastic in RAID 5 and RAID 0 for me and my newest PC build. Let me digress a little and I'll rate the HD's after I tell you how I am using them.
I have four (4) in a FirmTek SeriTek 2eEN4 4-Bay HotSwap RAID Enclosure as my primary "write-to" HD system for video and sound projects, in a RAID 5, so total space available in RAID 5 is 3TB. A RAID 5 uses speed and redundancy so it's an ideal medium for film or audio, as it "saves" one HD as a "spare drive" in the array, just in case of a single HD failure, and will replace that failed drive with the "saved" drive instantly so that you never lose data, or hardly ever. You'd have to have 2 HD's out of the 3 fail to lose data with RAID 5, at least in theory this is the case.
The RAID 5 is connected to an Areca 1680IX-8 SAS to eSATA/SATA Hardware RAID Controller in the PC, and it's got a rudimentary installation of Vista 64-bit Ultimate on it to make it bootable, also. That's correct, I can boot the PC externally using the RAID 5 if necessary, and I do when I am building a film project from scratch if you must know the application's benefits. The RAID 5 writes at more than 405MB/sec, and reads at more than 430MB/sec with an empty volume to give you some perspective on "Hardware RAID" versus software, or system-bus RAID on an internal volume, so there is quite a benefit with the Areca 1680IX-8 controller in place.
The second use for my WD Black SATA 2 HD's is as the boot system for the PC 90% of the time, as I have two (2) of the HD's mounted internally in the PC, still pushed by the Areca controller for hardware RAID 0 inside the case also. I have all of my main applications like Photoshop CS3, Illustrator 11, etc+ my web browser, Outlook, Mail, on this HD system, as it suffices to drive the PC most of the time, but for when I use the external RAID 5 and am involved in a film project. The 2TB RAID 0 (c.1.8TB formatted) gets your attention right away, as it's much faster than a system bus RAID 0 could ever be with the hardware controller in charge: HD Tune Pro says that empty, it writes at more than 200/sec and reads at more than 210MB/sec, which is 50% faster than a WD Raptor 10K drive, so two of the Black SATA 2 HD's in RAID 0 is another surprise fast package using the Areca 1680IX-8 controller!
The internal RAID 0 launches the OS and the applications, even with Vista's stodgy factors entering the mix, in less than 1 minute! Yes, it's true, it IS faster than sin on the Bible. It "whirrs" a little when it's seeking and searching for data, and a little more during writes, but it's not unpleasant at all considering how fast it's going about its business. These WD Black SATA 2 HD's are just amazing things with 32MB Cache x 2 on board, for 64MB cache in a RAID 0, so things happen very, very fast between the logistics of the HD's and the controller doing their work.
I am constantly amazed at the speed of the RAID 0 for just being two (2) HD's, but again, it's the hardware RAID that does the job, and there is no substitute for it of you want ultimate performance in your PC system. Let's see, what are some general comments about these SATA 2 HD's that makes sense to the layman...OK, here goes:
1) As mentioned above, the 32MB/64MB (2 x HD's in RAID 0) Cache really makes for a fast ride for any data writing or reading, and seek/access time is approximately 10.4m/s (milliseconds), with a Burst Rate of 410+MB/sec, according to HD Tune Pro's Benchmarks, so hardware RAID is virtually off-scale for a 2HD SATA 2 array of any sort with RAID 0
2) Running the File Benchmark with a 64MB file goes off-scale completely with HD Tune Pro, yielding almost 1500MB/sec write speed, and 1250MB/sec read speed, so you have to use a larger file size of 512MB to get any real world performance measurement done, and that gives us up to 200MB/sec read speed, and more than 350MB/sec write speed, very commendable stats
3) I don't have anything but subjective RAID usage to give up to the nice people at Amazon.com, but I would expect nominal 90MB/sec+ read and write speed in a single volume setup with these WD Black SATA 2 HD's, as they are just about 20% less speedy than a 10K RPM Raptor HD in the 300GB capacity (I have one of those in the PC for comparison), so you're not giving up much in the way of performance with a normal system bus setup with the WD Black SATA 2 HD's
The most obvious benefit from the Black series SATA 2 WD HD's is Enterprise Status, which means 5-year warranty service should anything ever go wrong with one, and that gives me confidence in the HD's aplenty! They are rated at 1,000,000 hours MTBF (mean time before failure), only topped by the Raptor 2's 1.25M MTBF rating in the spectrum of WD HD's available. These SATA HD's are not the low energy draw HD's like the GP SATA 2 drives are, and I'd suggest you go with GP HD's if you want to worry about economy and watts per HD...these guys are power hungry HD's and will take their measure of watts in a system, all they can get in fact, up to 14W-15W per HD at peak write/read speeds.
In closing, at less than $95 shipped per 1TB SATA 2 HD these things are the bargain of the year at Amazon.com, and I'd suggest perhaps that they are the most underpriced HD's for sale here. Regarding shipping, I am always amazed at the inconsistency of Amazon.com shipping when it comes to HD packaging. WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO LEARN? You have to be consistent, pack each HD in its own HD-specific box, with foam anti-static cushions, wrapped up in an individual anti-static casing, or you just don't belong in the business of shipping HD's! It's just about that simple to me, and I have received 3 out of 4 HD's packaged correctly, then got two more and they were packed in air bladders in a box, semi-loose, and subject to damage of all sorts.
Good GRIEF AMAZON.COM!!!! Can't you get it together and ship these things packaged correctly, all the time? There is no excuse for shipping these great HD's in crappy packing, there's just no sense in it...so get yourselves busy doing it right, ok? PLEASE?
Wavey Davey 7-26-2009
By Deal Man
The drive was not secure in the shipping box; I could feel the drive sliding around before opening the box. When I opened the sealed antistatic bag, I noticed the moisture gel pack had broken because beads were falling out of the bag. The worst part of it was when I pulled the hard drive out of the bag and turned the drive upside down, a couple of beads came out of the drive. I had 2 choices at this time, send it back or install it and see if it works. I decided to take my chances and formatted the drive. The drive works fine and I'm using it as an external back-up drive in a USB enclosure. I read all the reviews beforehand so I knew what to expect when ordering the OEM drive. It has a 5 year warranty and it seems to work even though it got tossed around in shipping.
By music_fan75
This is a great hard drive, with good speeds, size, noise and heat. I'd recommend it to anyone looking for some great storage. I actually used it to replace the system drive in my Mac G5, and it's great!
However I returned the drive shipped to me by Amazon because of the poor packaging, and spent an extra $20 to buy it a BestBuy so it would be in retail packaging. The extra money was worth it to me to ensure that it wasn't beat up in shipping. Amazon needs to change their shipping habits of sensitive items like hard drives and camera lenses to name a few.
**Buy this OEM Bulk hard drive from Amazon with caution!!**
Good luck!
BZ
By J. McKee (Bloomfield, NJ United States)
I ordered this drive next day air cause I needed this for a friends setup (last minute request). Anyway, I received the drive late due to UPS shipping issues and honestly I was amazed the drive still works. It was shipped in a tiny box with only padding on the top the drive (so it can still move around the box). I tested the drive for a few hours and luckily everything passed.
I will give the product 5 stars, but the shipping 0 stars...sorry Amazon.
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