Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB Hard Drive Review

Jason Landals

16 years ago

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As hard drive sizes continue to balloon, we are constantly bombarded with the one and singular question that guides our choice when it comes to the storage in our systems: Do we want a hard drive that has incredibly fast performance, or incredibly cavernous storage space? Though you can almost get that with the many 640GB 2-platter models that dot the landscape, true performance comes with drives like the VelociRaptor or any of the solid state drives out there. Western Digital is hoping to break that trend with their “Black Edition” Caviar hard drives.

This latest drive represents a split in Western Digital’s line of hard drives. Rather than having a “one drive fits all” product line for standard hard drives, they’ve split it into three separate channels. You already know about the “Green” drives, which we used in our review of the Thecus N3200PRO NAS enclosure and are designed for cool, quiet and eco-friendliness. The next in the chain is the “Blue” series, which is made to offer the best performance and reliability for everyday computing. Finally we come to the “Black” drives, which are claimed to be the crème de la crème of performance desktop drives.

A Tale of Two Processors

The Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB hard drive doesn’t look any different than any other 3.5″ drive. It maintains the same form factor, and follows the same SATA connector standards. This means you can use this in a case or NAS box that has a standard SATA backplane. With all that in mind, we are pressed to find any difference between this and another 1TB drive other then what is invisible or on paper.

Flipping over the drive, we find the controller board. However it doesn’t appear to have contacts that would give away the presence of two IC chips. Looks like there really isn’t any physical differences in this drive.

Features and Specifications

The features and specifications on these drives are geared towards getting the maximum amount of performance to serve a powerful desktop computer. What makes the difference is found inside the drive, and in the case of the “Black” drives is outlined below.

High Performance Electronics Architecture
- Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
- 32 MB cache – Bigger, faster cache means faster performance.
Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture
- 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.
- 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.
5 Year Limited Warranty

The rest of the specifications can be found on the product home page. As for pricing, the extra electronics and engineering found in the Caviar Black drives does command a slight price premium. Looking sites like NCIX, the average 1TB hard drive can be found for around $100 USD as of the publishing of this article. The Caviar Black drives on the other hand are priced between $30 and $35 more then that average. Is the extra price premium worth it? Let’s find out!

The Test Rig

Since there isn’t any physical difference to separate this drive from any other, it’s up to the performance tests to tell us what the difference is. To test the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB hard drive we installed it into the following rig.

In addition to the VelociRaptor we also included the WD Caviar SE16 and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drive in our tests. For testing software, we used HDTune and a couple suites from PCMark Vantage. HDTune was used to test the raw speed of the drive in both read and write, as well as access times. PCMark Vantage on the other hand was used to see how the Caviar Black drive held up in a variety of everyday tasks, and how the drive affected the speed with which those tasks were completed. Let’s go!

Testing and Results

Since synthetic tests don’t necessarily translate into real world performance, we decided to start with HDTune. This is simply to take a look at the raw speed and performance of the drives in question. Unlike PCMark Vantage, HDTune is a purely synthetic test. It simply tests the raw speed of the drive, without any consideration for the data on it or what is running.

Unfortunately things don’t look so good from the start for the Caviar Black. WD’s drive is slower then all the other drives tested here in both Average Transfer Rate and Burst Rate. This is where factors like aerial density, spindle speed, and platter count can really make a difference. All the drives in these tests have at least one of those as an advantage over the Caviar Black.

Write testing didn’t faire much better. The Caviar Black continued to be bested by every other drive in our test, posting double-digit performance deficits to the Seagate and WD drives. I re-ran these tests twice to verify the results, and was able to reproduce them with very little margin for error. Why was this occurring? Well as I noted above, the Seagate drive has a higher aerial density, and the WD Caviar SE16 has a low platter count. These two factors make for less movement required of the read/write head, meaning data can be written quicker.

When we tested access times, we were relieved to see that the Caviar Black at least scales in that test. The drive follows the curve one would expect moving from the VelociRaptor to the Seagate 1.5TB drive.

Hoping that things start to look up for the Caviar Black we turn to Futuremark’s latest system benchmark suite: PCMark Vantage. The two tests we focused on were the PCMark composite test and the Hard Drive specific test. Though we are trying to simulate real world use, the myriad of other tests in PCMark Vantage don’t specifically test HD performance. Rather they place more emphasis on CPU and RAM speed. As for the tests themselves, they are synthetic, but they borrow code from real world apps for testing.

The results produced by PCMark were actually rather redeeming for the Caviar Black. Sure the VelociRaptor takes a decidedly large lead over the other hard drives, but that’s to be expected. I was also expecting the high aerial density and low platter count of the 640GB Caviar SE16 to best the Caviar Black, but the Black took a nice lead over it. In the composite test the Caviar Black posted a 10% increase over the WD 640GB Caviar SE16, and a 4% performance increase of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drive. In the HDD tests, the Caviar Black posted performance increases of 21% and 19% over the two drives respectively.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Now that the dust has cleared, it’s time to determine where we stand on the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB hard drive. On the one hand, we have a 1TB drive that offers what is claimed to be the best performance around for a desktop drive. It has a dual processor and a myriad of other technologies that are supposed to make it fast. On the other hand its performance is somewhat suspect in our usual test suites.

Although the HDTune testing didn’t go so well for the Caviar Black, the drive did manage to redeem itself in the PCMark tests. The results posted from that test were inline with what WD claims. Also we need to take into account the problems Seagate is having with it’s drives right now. Drives that all of a sudden forget they are hard drives is a bad thing. It’s hard to find anyone in the industry willing to recommend their hard drives even if they have issued firmware fixes. This makes drives like the Caviar Black that much more enticing because you simply don’t have to deal with these sorts of issues. Peace of mind is always worth something, especially in these trying economic times.

So what am I trying to say? Well in the end, it’s hard to deny the Western Digital Caviar Black as a viable option for someone looking for a large reliable drive for their performance system. It’s not as fast a VelociRaptor, but it’s also much cheaper. OK, a lot cheaper. Not to mention, it uses a standard form factor unlike the Velociraptor, which makes it ideal in most circumstances. Though it’s not as cavernous as the Seagate 1.5TB, it’s far more reliable in the real world. It’s a good all around drive for a system that needs both performance and storage space. When Western Digital rolls out their 2.0TB models in a little while, it’ll be that much more enticing.

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