Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD1001FALS
by Western Digital
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD1001FALS
Customer Review: WD Caviar Black - Can't go Wrong
Summary: 5 Stars
Nothing I can say against this drive, ~$100 for 1TB and a caviar black at that.
I have this on an ASUS Server board's Marvell RAID controller in a RAID 1 with another (identical drive) I had purchased previously from Newegg. Been great so far as my main data archive.
I've now used this drive in several different configurations since June 2009 when I originally wrote this review, and I'd like to supplement what I previously wrote. I'll probably be duplicating a lot of what other have written, but so what - my unique experience might help you with your situation (contact me with questions if you wish)
First, general notes:
This drive is fast, cool, and quiet. The only time I ever hear it is when it spools up from being asleep, and when its crunching on a particularly large file (or large series of files). Usually, my velociraptor (or NAS) drowns it out.
Next, Pros and Cons:
Pros:
32 MB Cache, w/ Dual CPU - minimal use of my xeons to run this drive
Price per TB - falling every day
5 Year Warranty - I can see this drive still working in 5 years
higher density platter design - improves seek time
Cons:
Spool Up Time from power save - if I wanted a power saver I'd have bought a caviar Green
RAID - does not work well in RAID arrays (WD trying to sell more expensive RE versions)
Bottom Line:
So long as you know that you're getting a bulk drive (no cables or OEM packaging) and don't intend to try and do RAID arrays without working firmware magic, then this is an outstanding drive. The performance, reliability, and warranty make it a no-brainer purchase.
If you want to do RAIDs, look at the samsung spinpoint raid drives or the deskstars (or spend the money to get the RE drives).
If you want a power saver, go for a Caviar Green
If you want more speed, then you're looking at setting up a RAID0, using a WD velociraptor, or using SSDs
If you think that your planned useage fits with the functionality of this drive, then go for it! You won't regret it!
Workstation:
ASUS DSEB-DG Server Board
Dual Intel Xeon 52XX Dual Core CPUs (not a production chip)
8 GB FBDIMM ECC Memory (DDR2 800)
WD Velociraptor 300 GB 10,000 RPM SATA2
PNY GTX 265
Creative X-Fi Sound Card
Corsair 1000W Power Supply
Thermaltake Armor Case
Uses of Drive:
Configuration 1 - Software RAID1 on Marvell Raid controller on ASUS DSEB-DG mainboard
Configuration 2 - Hardware RAID1 on Synology DS 209 NAS
Configuration 3 - Data drive on my main workstation (I sold its older brother)
Config 1 notes - I discarded this usage because I was worried about my ability to rebuild the RAID array if a drive failed (or my motherboard). I had troubles building the array with the Marvel software, and was worried that in re-building I might lose all my data. Thus, I switched to a Synology DS 209 NAS
Config 2 notes - these drives do NOT work well in a RAID1. Many have had this issue. Unfortunately I purchased mine AFTER WD changed the firmware to not allow RAID in their non-RE3 drives. Now, I've heard of a colleague successfully flashing the RE3 firmware onto this drive, but I have no idea how he did it. But, I simply purchased (2) Hitachi Deskstar 2TB drives for my NAS, and sold my second caviar black to a friend to subsidize the project (see my separate review of the hitachis)
Config 3 Notes - Operating by itself (internal drive) is essentially what this was designed to do, and it does it well. The only con is the spool up mentioned - although it saves power, it takes about 15 seconds, which can be annoying
Customer Review: Beginner's guide to adding a second hard drive
Summary: 5 Stars
This is for people (like me) who've never done this before... I use Windows Vista and an HP desktop computer.
1. Ordered this drive, which arrived promptly. Drive was well packed with foam. As expected, it didn't come with anything else. It works fine, and to me it doesn't seem noisy.
2. Ordered Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches). Note: older computers won't support SATA. If you have a newer computer, it should work. SATA cables are red and about 1 cm wide, the older cables are about an inch wide and silvery. If your hard drive uses these, don't get this drive.
3. Ordered Tripp Lite P946-12I Serial ATA (SATA) Dual Power Adapter Cable - 4pin/2x15pin SATA - 12in. This is a "Y" adapter (optimistically planning for my next hard drive!), but a straight one would also work. I found out after it arrived I already had a SATA power adapter in my case. However, it wouldn't have reached with the available wiring length, so I still ended up using this.
4. In my case, the drive requires 4 screws to install it. These are short screws with large flat heads, the heads form a sort of "rail" for it to glide into the rack on. On opening my case, I realized that HP had thoughtfully provided extra screws for future upgrades! The drive does not come with screws.
5. Installed drive in rack, plugged in the two cables, no problem.
6. Get to Windows. Your new hardware icon should say "locating... installing" or something like that.
7. Go to Start-Computer (right click on Computer) - Manage - then to Disk Management. Find your new drive at the bottom of the screen, and click over the "drive 1" (or whatever) designation to make it "online". Then right click the long color band over the drive's partition graphic and start the "new simple volume" wizard. Stayed with the defaults.
That's about it, everything worked the first time. After the drive was up and running, I decided to error-check the drive from Windows Explorer (under the tools tab for drive). This gave the unexpected result of giving me a blank screen for several hours while it checked it. When I've error-checked drive c:\, my screen gives me information on what it's doing. This was just totally blank, which was disconcerting, but in a few hours it finished what it was doing and everything worked.
I also went into the BIOS on bootup (pressed F10 while booting, don't know if this is the same on other PC's) to see if I needed to do anything there, but I didn't. The new drive was already listed. I did get a new option on booting, to set up the drive in a RAID configuration, I left this alone. (non-RAID)
This is written to help first-timers like me. If any experienced computer folks want to comment and add pearls of wisdom feel free!
Customer Review: Good Drive, comparison to the WD green series and older hdd
Summary: 5 Stars
First off, I'm your slightly above average computer user. I can build my own computer, but I don't claim to know everything and other techno mumbo jumbo. I usually have to go read on online forums to help me through with some more advanced computer stuff.
That said, my WD 250gb drive died on me this past month. It was starting to give me errors and using a program called "Speed Fan", it read the "SMART" data on my hdd and indicated that there were errors in the hdd. It was time to replace!
I chose WD because of experience with their green drives. I have 3 green drives (2x750gb 1x1tb) for the past 2 years and they run 24/7 downloading torrents, streaming media to xbox, storing nearly a million pictures, mp3s, etc etc. ZERO problems and the green drives run at an average of about 30 degrees! That's without the fancy cooling that some guys have. I just use a regular [...] Antec case. That beings said, the 250gb WD (non green drive) that died ran at about 42 degrees.
I installed this 1tb WD black without a hitch. I chose the 1TB not because i needed the extra storage but the cost over lower capacity drives was minimal that i said "why not." It has dual processor with 32mb cache, and a bunch of other stuff. Also, some online forum people were saying that in the WD black series, the 640gb and 1tb are the fastest compared to the other speeds. This is because of the higher platter density (334?) compared to the other sizes in the series.
But does the drive actually perform faster? YES, actually it does. I usually don't notice a speed increase with an upgraded drive but this time I noticed it. It's not HUGE, but noticeable. Firefox and my mail programs are launching just a few seconds faster. HD videos seem to start up faster with less lag.
This drive runs about 35-36 degrees in my case, vs the 30 degrees of the green drive. So it does a run a little hotter, but not as hot as my old 250gb.
I would recommend this product.
I hope this review was helpful to you.
PS:
The packaging from Amazon really wasn't that great. The guy who posted up how the drive was packaged... via 2 sheets of bubble wrap, that's EXACTLY how my hdd came. I'm not sure if I would order a hdd from Amazon again.
Customer Review: A Great Solution for PCs and/or Macs
Summary: 5 Stars
The 1TB WD Caviar Black hard drive is an excellent piece of computer equipment. If you're looking for the three S's - speed, storage, and silence - then look no further. Although, granted, it isn't quite "silent." More like "near-silent."
I have two of these drives installed in two completely different systems. The first one acts as a storage drive for my custom built Windows PC. I have read and written thousands upon thousands of files, ranging from music to movies to games, on this drive and it has handled it all without a hiccup. The performance is speedy (about 20-25% faster than my previous 250GB WD storage drive, confirmed with benchmarks) and the drive itself has been quite reliable thus far. Unless you're storing an entire video library on this thing, chances are pretty good that you will not run out of space anytime soon.
My second WD Caviar Black drive is acting as the system disk in my 20" aluminum iMac (late-2008 model). First off, I highly recommend that anyone who wishes to consider installing their own hard drive upgrade in one of the new iMac's either have a background in electronics and computer hardware, or find someone who can do it for you. That being said, I pulled out the old stock 320GB Seagate drive and replaced it with this WD model. I've noticed that the drive is slightly louder than the Seagate, but only when I'm operating in a silent environment. If you are apt to play music, have fans running, or work in a noisy office environment, you probably won't even notice the difference, unless you have superhuman bionic hearing or something of that nature. The speed appears to be noticeably faster than the old Seagate drive, although I have not run benchmarks to confirm my observations. Programs seem to open with greater speed and the boot time has been reduced as well.
I should probably clarify that the greater speed I'm experiencing isn't Earth-shattering. I'm talking about only a few seconds. Either way, this drive performs admirably as a boot disk for the iMac.
Overall, I would highly recommend this drive to anyone looking to upgrade their Windows or Apple desktop computers. I've been a steadfast customer of Western Digital drives for several years now and with good reason: I haven't had one fail me yet.
Customer Review: Four of these bad boys and their RAID results
Summary: 5 Stars
Enough of the other reviewers have provided information about ease of use, what comes in the box, how to set them up, and debated the various merits of Western Digitals reliability and customer service that I feel no need to restate my own thoughts and opinions on those matters.
I purchased these drives to increase the storage space in my home office media server (Dell PowerEdge, 3.0Ghz HT, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, PCI/e SATA II RAID controller). Before selecting a final RAID configuration I did extensive testing of these drives to determine read performance (write isn't that much of an issue when streaming video and music to various locations) and here are the results of those tests.
The "control" group was the PowerEdge's two 360GB WD green drives configured in RAID 1 (disk mirroring) (the OS drive is a pair of EIDE 10GB drives in RAID 1). These results are the average of four passes with HD Tune.
Control:
RAID/Space/Max Read (MB/s)/AVG Read (MB/s)/CPU
1 / 360GB / 99.6 / 76 / 2.1%
1TB WD Black drives
RAID/Space/Max Read (MB/s)/AVG Read (MB/s)/CPU
0 / 4 TB / 205.3 /168.8 / 6.1%
1 / 2 TB / 108.6 / 86.3 / 2.9%
0-1 / 2 TB / 207.3 /168.6 / 6.5%
5 / 3 TB / 233.0 / 205.9 / 8.6%
Comparing "apples to apples" in a RAID 1 configuration the 1TB WD Black drives are noticeably faster than the smaller Green drives. I was rather surprised that the RAID 5 configuration scored so much faster than the RAID 0-1 configuration and in the end I went with the RAID5 configuration as it gave me the best "bang for the buck" (reliability, speed, and available space).
Prior to implementing RAID5 with these drives on the server the average transfer rate from the WD Green drives to my laptop via 802.11g router was 1.8MB/s (this was tested using large audio and media files). With that same router I am now seeing 4.6MB/s (roughly 42Mbs), which is near enough to the theoretical limit of 54Mbs on the router that I suspect the reason it isn't faster are due to limitations of the router. Doing hardwired tests (plugging the laptop into the 100Mbs ports on the router via a network cable) would seem to confirm this as the transfer rate improved from 1.9MB/s to 10.3MB/s.