Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black Review

Performance Analysis

After the disappointment of the similarly 500GB platter equipped 2TB Caviar Green it’s great to see Western Digital has produced an exceedingly quick drive in the form of the 2TB Caviar Black, with the high density of the 500GB platters combining with the 7,200RPM spindle speed to make the 2TB impressively nippy.

Theoretical performance in HD-Tach is extremely pleasing, with the 2TB Black surpassing the 10,000RPM Velociraptor for average read across the drive with a speed of 117.7MB/s –fantastic for a hard disk drive. While average write isn’t quite as impressive, at 72.6MB/s in comparison the Samsung Spinpoint F1’s 81.2MB/s, it’s nothing to be sniffed at and HD-Tach results don’t always directly translate into real world performance.

Moving to FC-Test and the 2TB Caviar Black soon proves that it certainly isn’t a slouch when it comes to write speeds, writing our MP3 and ISO file patterns in 11.4 seconds and 19.1 seconds respectively - speeds significantly superior to those of other 1TB+ HDDs. Copy speeds are similarly superb and write speeds are also very healthy. Reading our 1GB MP3 file pattern took just 5.2 seconds and our 1.6GB ISO file pattern an impressive 12.4 seconds, faster than any other hard disk drive we’ve ever tested.


While the 2TB Caviar Black doesn’t claim to be able to touch SSDs on random read or write performance, we’ve included IOmeter results as a matter of course when using our storage benchmark suite. Sadly, we’ve had to return our review sample of the 2TB Green, but you can be sure that the 2TB Black’s 7,200RPM spindle significantly improves things, although with a random read speed of 0.66MB/s and a random write speed of 0.95MB/s the advantage of SSDs in the performance storage market is clear.

IOmeter also reveals that the 2TB Black’s maximum write latencies can occasionally creep up to almost 100ms – hardly noticeable in everyday use, but notable higher than the typical maximum write latencies of 33ms we’ve experienced with the Samsung Spinpoint F1.

All this theoretical testing is useful, but it’s real world testing where this hard disk needs to be judged and where it clearly shows its technological edge when booting Windows Vista. A boot time of just 54 seconds is two seconds quicker than even a 10,000RPM VelociRaptor and a full six seconds faster than the Spinpoint F1. The 2TB Black also impresses when loading Crysis, shaving a second off of the level load times of competing 1TB+ hard disks to record a level load time of 36 seconds, although this is still a second shy of the 10,000RPM VelociRaptor.