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Western Digital Caviar Black  (Source: Western Digital)
Caviar Black HDD has 32MB cache

The storage capacity and performance of hard drives used by desktop computers is growing all the time. Capacity isn’t the only thing to consider with a hard drive; the read/ write performance and cache size comes into play as well.

Western Digital has introduced a new Caviar Black line of hard drives that is available in both 750GB and 1TB storage capacities. The new drives have twice the normal cache size of typical drives with 32MB of high-performance cache memory. The Black edition drives also feature dual electronics architecture processors for twice the processing power.

The motor shaft on the drives is secured at both ends to reduce vibration and the technology is dubbed StableTrac. Western Digital also uses NoTouch ramp technology that prevents the recording head from touching the media for reduced wear and longer operational life. The Caviar Black line uses SATA 3.0 interface. The buffer to disk transfer rate is 145MB/s max.

The Caviar Black drives can withstand operating shock of 30G and a non-operating shock of 250G. At idle the drive produces 24 dBA of sound, seek mode 0 produces 33 dBA, and seek mode 3 produces 29 dBA of sound. The rotational speed of the drives is 7200 RPM.

Both the 750GB and 1TB drives will be available next week with the 750GB retailing for $199 and the 1TB retailing for $249. Western Digital didn’t comment on the platter size used in the new Black drives. Western Digital recently moved to 334GB platters for some of its other 1TB Caviar drives.

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wowaweewa"
By GhandiInstinct on 6/10/2008 2:44:35 PM , Rating: 2
I like, it's nice.




RE: wowaweewa"
By XtAzY on 6/10/2008 2:56:48 PM , Rating: 2
you chose that post title from Borat isnt it haha

Cant wait to see performance results. I need to replace my Maxtor soon. I'm afraid it will die very soon.


RE: wowaweewa"
By RjBass on 6/10/2008 3:23:56 PM , Rating: 5
A Maxtor? I'm surprised it hasn't died already.


RE: wowaweewa"
By StevoLincolnite on 6/10/2008 8:57:34 PM , Rating: 2
Your not the only one, however occasionally you do get a drive that lasts for many years, I have a 20gb Maxtor Drive still humming along (Although loud) in another machine which I got in the late 1990's.


RE: wowaweewa"
By RjBass on 6/10/2008 9:39:51 PM , Rating: 2
That was purchased before they were bought out and became the low end product line for a larger HDD company.


RE: wowaweewa"
By RjBass on 6/11/2008 2:01:34 PM , Rating: 3
Wow I got rated down for speaking the truth.

Those of you who don't know, Maxtor used to be a pretty good company that made pretty good HDDs. But when they fell into some financial trouble the quality of their products went down some. Then in 2006 they were bought out by Seagate and turned into Seagates low end brand. That was the time when Maxtors quality really went down.

Maxtor drives were awesome back in the IBM XT days (pre 94) and they were still decent enough up till about 2003 or so. My business of fixing computers has seen a huge boost largely in part because of Dell. In 2002 and 2003 Dell used mostly Maxtor HDD's in their consumer desktops. This resulted in my bench nearly over flowing with Dell computers with bad Maxtor HDD's in them which also resulted in my kids having a great Christmas in 06 and 07.

Now with every HDD manufacturer you will find success stories and failure stories. Some people will to this day not purchase anything but Maxtor HDD"s as they have had no issues with them, while many others won't go near them anymore. I am obviously part of the latter group.


RE: wowaweewa"
By DeepBlue1975 on 6/10/2008 9:59:13 PM , Rating: 2
Tell me about it. The drive in my PC is the third maxtor 300gb I had to get in order to get a good one. This one's just crossed the 3 year old barrier and I'm looking for alternatives and mean to replace it before it hits the 4 year mark.

This one in the article looks interesting, but from a cost standpoint, the old SE16 750gb and, even better, the new 640gb one look more attractive.

The thing I don't know if I still care so much about getting the fastest available drive, as I can't notice such a great performance difference in normal usage scenarios... And specially when I know that SSDs can be much faster and it might be only a question of waiting maybe a couple (of couples of couples?) of years to finally be able to attain a quantum leap in performance at a reasonable price.


RE: wowaweewa"
By XtAzY on 6/11/2008 2:48:17 AM , Rating: 2
My 200gb Maxtor died already. The PCB was toast for some reason. My 300gb still humming nicely. If that PCB dies too, I'm gonna plug it into 120V and watch the fireworks just to entertain me from sadness.


RE: wowaweewa"
By BruceLeet on 6/10/08, Rating: -1
RE: wowaweewa"
By teldar on 6/10/2008 4:58:08 PM , Rating: 3
I'm starting to think the only way to go is going to be the GreenPower drives for mass storage of absolutely everything with a small and fast system drive of limited capacity for programs.

That, and my experience with the 7200.11 drives hasn't impressed me a whole lot yet. Two drives dying within six months for the both of them..... Not good.


RE: wowaweewa"
By BruceLeet on 6/10/2008 7:54:58 PM , Rating: 3
Its my storage drive, I use them for storage.

My C drive is a 150GB Raptor. Maxtor drives kept failing on me after 6-12 months.


RE: wowaweewa"
By HrilL on 6/10/2008 4:41:39 PM , Rating: 2
I agree. Its about time I get rid of my older drives in my server. I currently have 1125GB of usable storage on 7 drives. If I get 2 of these I'll get way better perfomance and more space. /me drools for 2 of these in raid 0 And I'll be saving quite a bit in power consumption as well. Since the kwh rate is going to go up soon due to the high oil prices no doubt.


32M cache
By Natfly on 6/10/2008 3:01:10 PM , Rating: 4
quote:
The new drives have twice the normal cache size of typical drives with 32MB


Most large capacity (750/1000) drives from other manufacturers have had 32MB of cache for a long while now(Seagate .11's, Samsung, Hitachi), its about time WD got with it.




RE: 32M cache
By webdawg77 on 6/10/2008 3:06:19 PM , Rating: 2
I think that typical meant 250GB - 500GB drives. The typical drives that the majority of people buy (price per GB that people want).


RE: 32M cache
By DOCDAT1 on 6/10/2008 4:09:47 PM , Rating: 3
Though WD's drives have generally still been faster even with less cache...


RE: 32M cache
By Goty on 6/10/2008 4:29:12 PM , Rating: 4
That's exactly right. WD takes a slightly different approach than most other Hard Disk manufacturers in that they choose to use a better optimized, smaller cache. Seeing as that's the case, the performance of these new drives should be pretty good.


RE: 32M cache
By erikejw on 6/10/2008 8:54:42 PM , Rating: 3
32M is probably just for show.
They released their topoftheline Velociraptor 10k rpm drive with 16Mb and calimed they had done extensive research for 32Mb and did not find any improvements.


Caviar Black edition
By AmberClad on 6/10/2008 2:58:49 PM , Rating: 5
Caviar "Black"? Is the rotational speed on this thing unlocked?




RE: Caviar Black edition
By AmazighQ on 6/10/2008 3:46:24 PM , Rating: 4
its some marketing thing to know what kind of HDD 'class' it is
black = preformace
blue = mainstream
green = low power


RE: Caviar Black edition
By MrPoletski on 6/11/2008 5:39:52 AM , Rating: 2
Just don't buy the brown drives, they are total crap.


RE: Caviar Black edition
By JonnyDough on 6/11/20