The sheer performance and capacity on offer here shows that the hard drive market has a few milestones to pass before SSDs take over. However, that's not all that the Caviar Black has highlighted. All of the major manufacturers produce drives either side of the £60 mark, and they all offer incredible value for money for most day-to-day uses.ġTB should certainly last you a while as well, and as we move more and more towards cloud-based storage, it could be enough to last you on your client side for several years to come. What Western Digital has managed with the release of this 2TB drive is to highlight the great value that there is to be had from the 1TB hard drive market. Worse than that, you could grab three drives and set up a potentially more reliable RAID-5 array with the same capacity for less than the asking price of just this one drive. Even so, for the vast majority of users a pair of 1TB drives will do the same job and cost half as much. There will certainly be specific setups that will demand large storage capacities in a single 3.5in drive enclosure, and if money isn't an issue then there's clearly a lot to like here. This has driven prices of 1TB drives down significantly – you're looking at spending as little as £54 for such capacities, making the Caviar Black look outrageously costly.
#WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR BLACK WD5003AZEX CRYSTAL DISKMARK PC#
The standard capacity for new platters rolls in at the 1TB mark, and this forms the sweet spot for internal drives too. Overview Western Digital Caviar Black WD5003AZEX 500 GB 3.5' Internal Hard Drive - SATA/600 - 7200 rpm - 64 MB Buffer - OEM 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.
There was a time when this would have been a bargain, but the market has moved on considerably since then. The Caviar Black 2TB edition is just a little too expensive for serious consideration at approx £250. While performance certainly helps the cause, hard drives aren't only about speed, and this is where we bump into a fundamental problem with this new drive – its price. WD covers the drive with a generous five-year warranty, though, which should be enough for most users. The drive can be loud, and it can run hot. It achieves this incredible seek time thanks to a new dual-stage actuator that combines a fast course movement with a finer precision stage that completes the seeking. In testing (using HDTach) we saw an average read and write performance of 113.1MB/s and a random access time of 11.3ms. Western Digital has crammed 2TB of storage into the Caviar Black by using four 500GB platters spinning at 7,200rpm. It isn't quite SSD level fast, but compared to your average hard drive it has a serious turn of speed. It does, however, pack an incredible punch in the performance stakes thanks in part to a huge 64MB cache and two-stage actuator to make seek times speedy.
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