bit-tech.net | Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black Review

Dragunover 2nd October 2009, 11:01

What about the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB??
From what I can tell it should be able to beat this hard-drive overall.

stonedsurd 2nd October 2009, 11:06

Quote:

we still need a place to stick all our downloaded “Still Alive” remixes and Windows 7 RC images and it’s here that the hard disk drive is still undispited king, for now.

I'm really sorry, but this sort of throws me when I'm reading through the article. Use MS Word right before you publish?

From the review, I see that the current generation of 7200rpm drives have basically made the VelociRaptor a bit irrelevant. My poor baby :(

Baz 2nd October 2009, 11:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by stonedsurd
Quote:
we still need a place to stick all our downloaded “Still Alive” remixes and Windows 7 RC images and it’s here that the hard disk drive is still undispited king, for now.
I'm really sorry, but this sort of throws me when I'm reading through the article. Use MS Word right before you publish?

From the review, I see that the current generation of 7200rpm drives have basically made the VelociRaptor a bit irrelevant. My poor baby :(

Cheers for the spot - not sure how that made it through!

Sadly yes, the 300GB VelociRaptor doesn't look too clever these days.

I'm working on the 1.5TB F3 review as we speak - review next week!

proxess 2nd October 2009, 11:29

Quote:

It might pack 2TB of storage, but you'll pay over twice the £/GB of cheaper 1GB hard disks.

On the last 1GB you mean 1TB right?

Paradigm Shifter 2nd October 2009, 11:56

First page - cache size... is that a typo? Because a cache size of 642MB is really impressive! :)

Baz 2nd October 2009, 12:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paradigm Shifter
First page - cache size... is that a typo? Because a cache size of 642MB is really impressive! :)

64MB is the the correct cache

Quote:

Originally Posted by proxess
Quote:
It might pack 2TB of storage, but you'll pay over twice the £/GB of cheaper 1GB hard disks.

On the last 1GB you mean 1TB right?

Indeed, it appears the edit fairies have been sleeping today! Either that or I'm just rubbish.

Horizon 2nd October 2009, 12:34

Honestly, to compare SSD's to Traditional hard drives is stupid, pointless at best. Literally it's like comparing a Corvette or Ferrari to a 1-ton Pickup Truck.

mrbens 2nd October 2009, 12:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dragunover
What about the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB??
From what I can tell it should be able to beat this hard-drive overall.

Thank you, that's exactly what I came here to say!

Who is going to buy one of these 2TB at that price?

Please review the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB instead.

If you don't have a review model yet then buy one! They are only £51 at Aria. :D

Also the 1.5TB F2 is only £61. If it's just used for storage the extra speed of the F3 won't be needed and the F2 should be quieter.

Cheers guys.

tank_rider 2nd October 2009, 12:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Horizon
Honestly, to compare SSD's to Traditional hard drives is stupid, pointless at best. Literally it's like comparing a Corvette or Ferrari to a 1-ton Pickup Truck.

But using your analogy the 1-ton Pickup Truck is being marketed as a supercar in the performance stakes! Omitting the results would give the casual reader an incomplete view and would make this drive look like it has amazing performance to beat everything else on the market.

mrbens 2nd October 2009, 12:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baz

I'm working on the 1.5TB F3 review as we speak - review next week!

I should have gone to Specsavers ;)

Please compare it to the F2 for sound levels if possible as that is more important than speed for a storage drive in a quiet PC.

Thanks :)

trig 2nd October 2009, 13:35

been using the 500 gb and 1 tb blacks in builds and love them. would love to see a review of the f3. surprised this drive came in noisy, as the others i have used seem very well mannered...

nilesfoundglory 2nd October 2009, 13:40

Quote:

Were also in a quandary as to what place a performance hard disk drive holds in todays market. Performance mechanical storage is rapidly going the way of way of the CRT monitor with the introduction of SSDs. The 2TB Caviar might offer close to sixteen times the storage of a similarly priced Indilinx based SSD, but the SSD will offer massively superior performance, especially when it comes to random read speeds where a Indilinx SSD is fifty times faster than the 2TB Caviar Black.

I take it nobody in the bit-tech offices does any large amount HD video editing, where a fast 2TB drive is a much better proposition than a screaming-fast-but-equally-expensive-and-tiny-capacity SSD. While SSD may be part of the future, I'm not holding my breath for a 2TB SSD, let alone waiting for one to sell for under $300/£230. Sometimes, in the pursuit of speed, it seems people lose sight of the overall picture.

Horizon 2nd October 2009, 13:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by tank_rider
But using your analogy the 1-ton Pickup Truck is being marketed as a supercar in the performance stakes! Omitting the results would give the casual reader an incomplete view and would make this drive look like it has amazing performance to beat everything else on the market.

Well that isn't far fetched as IRL, there were a few high performance trucks on the market a couple years back.

Baz 2nd October 2009, 14:12

All those waiting on the Spinpoint F3....I may have some bad news for you...

cosmic 2nd October 2009, 14:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baz
All those waiting on the Spinpoint F3....I may have some bad news for you...

Bad news - like its not worth the money or you broke it and can't finish the review :(

Baz 2nd October 2009, 15:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by cosmic
Quote:
Originally Posted by Baz
All those waiting on the Spinpoint F3....I may have some bad news for you...

Bad news - like its not worth the money or you broke it and can't finish the review :(

It still works and the review will still be going live next week, but those who think it'll be able to rival the WD 2TB Black are going to be surprised.

**EDIT**Or I could have been accidentally testing the 5400 RPM EcoGreen instead and not realised i'd plugged in the wrong drive...whoops. Rest easy Samsung fans!

Phil Rhodes 2nd October 2009, 15:40

These are potentially useful to me because I occasionally have the need to store 200MB/sec video streams.

They're still expensive, though, so I'll be looking at 1TB versions for the forseeable. Beyond that SSD may begin to compete.

B1GBUD 2nd October 2009, 16:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baz
Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmic
Quote:
Originally Posted by Baz
All those waiting on the Spinpoint F3....I may have some bad news for you...

Bad news - like its not worth the money or you broke it and can't finish the review :(

It still works and the review will still be going live next week, but those who think it'll be able to rival the WD 2TB Black are going to be surprised.

**EDIT**Or I could have been accidentally testing the 5400 RPM EcoGreen instead and not realised i'd plugged in the wrong drive...whoops. Rest easy Samsung fans!

I've been impatient and bought the F3..... I hope you're right

John_T 2nd October 2009, 17:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by nilesfoundglory
I take it nobody in the bit-tech offices does any large amount HD video editing, where a fast 2TB drive is a much better proposition than a screaming-fast-but-equally-expensive-and-tiny-capacity SSD. While SSD may be part of the future, I'm not holding my breath for a 2TB SSD, let alone waiting for one to sell for under $300/£230. Sometimes, in the pursuit of speed, it seems people lose sight of the overall picture.

A fair point, but for the money of this drive wouldn't you be better off doing your editing on the SDD, and then simply shipping the finished file onto a cheap HDD for storage? Although I'm one of those people who don't do any HD video editing - so I admit I'm only guessing - but surely even 2hr+ 1080p HD files are going to be sub-40GB?

A good review, but this does seem to be an incredibly niche product - sandwiched as it is between vastly superior performance at one end, and vastly cheaper storage, (for not much of a performance hit) at the other.

Like most people here, I'm a big fan of the Spinpoint series' mix of speed, low noise and low cost, (and have been since the 80GB drives) so will look forward to that...

John_T 2nd October 2009, 17:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baz

**EDIT**Or I could have been accidentally testing the 5400 RPM EcoGreen instead and not realised i'd plugged in the wrong drive...whoops. Rest easy Samsung fans!

Sorry, but that did make me laugh! :)

Not really your day today with this was it...

mrbens 2nd October 2009, 18:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baz
**EDIT**Or I could have been accidentally testing the 5400 RPM EcoGreen instead and not realised i'd plugged in the wrong drive...whoops. Rest easy Samsung fans!

haha brilliant :D

nilesfoundglory 2nd October 2009, 19:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by John_T
Quote:
Originally Posted by nilesfoundglory
I take it nobody in the bit-tech offices does any large amount HD video editing, where a fast 2TB drive is a much better proposition than a screaming-fast-but-equally-expensive-and-tiny-capacity SSD. While SSD may be part of the future, I'm not holding my breath for a 2TB SSD, let alone waiting for one to sell for under $300/£230. Sometimes, in the pursuit of speed, it seems people lose sight of the overall picture.

A fair point, but for the money of this drive wouldn't you be better off doing your editing on the SDD, and then simply shipping the finished file onto a cheap HDD for storage? Although I'm one of those people who don't do any HD video editing - so I admit I'm only guessing - but surely even 2hr+ 1080p HD files are going to be sub-40GB?

A good review, but this does seem to be an incredibly niche product - sandwiched as it is between vastly superior performance at one end, and vastly cheaper storage, (for not much of a performance hit) at the other.

Like most people here, I'm a big fan of the Spinpoint series' mix of speed, low noise and low cost, (and have been since the 80GB drives) so will look forward to that...

When working on a feature (or several features, depending on how you multi-task), you have to understand that uncompressed DV film takes up tons of space. Depending on bit rate and frame speed, an hour of uncompressed footage from a DV cam can take up over 400GB of space. Granted, my example is niche, but it's still fair to point out potential uses for a drive such as this rather than limiting the mindset of the review to, "How useful is this to the average user?"

thehippoz 2nd October 2009, 20:19

yeah good for video editors

redders 3rd October 2009, 00:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by nilesfoundglory

When working on a feature (or several features, depending on how you multi-task), you have to understand that uncompressed DV film takes up tons of space. Depending on bit rate and frame speed, an hour of uncompressed footage from a DV cam can take up over 400GB of space. Granted, my example is niche, but it's still fair to point out potential uses for a drive such as this rather than limiting the mindset of the review to, "How useful is this to the average user?"

This is a fair point, but I disagree really. I would have been happy to see a passing comment that this would be an option only if you're considering editing hours of HD video, but really, HD video editors will know that already. Afterall, we don't see reviews of the graphics cards used for CGI on here.. for a reason.

This hard drive to me falls into my 'dumb' category as for 99% of users, there will be a better option.

Also, pulled from the first website I found selling it:

Quote:

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.

..........nah.

John_T 3rd October 2009, 01:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by nilesfoundglory
When working on a feature (or several features, depending on how you multi-task), you have to understand that uncompressed DV film takes up tons of space. Depending on bit rate and frame speed, an hour of uncompressed footage from a DV cam can take up over 400GB of space. Granted, my example is niche, but it's still fair to point out potential uses for a drive such as this rather than limiting the mindset of the review to, "How useful is this to the average user?"

400GB for an hour of uncompressed HD footage? WOW! I had no idea.

OK, fair enough - I can see how for some this would start to make more sense now. It clearly is still a relatively niche product, but given the ubiquitousness of cheap HD camcorders in places like Currys and Dixons, (and the penchant for dad's and grandad's to shoot hours of family films) it's evidently not nearly as niche as I first thought.

I still reckon a bunch of 1TB's or 1.5TB's in a JBOD would offer far better value at the moment, but I suppose where would we be if we all thought, 'stuff innovation, I can make do with what I've got'?

I can at least see the point now....

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Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black Review

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