WD Caviar Black

Got loads of important data to store? Or just an unusually large porn collection?

Western Digital has revamped its naming structure, so instead of a vaguely intelligible series of letters and numbers that make up a model name, the Caviar Black is now its best standard desktop hard drive.

It’s made from parts that found themselves in the highest quality bin after testing, and comes with a 32MB cache in 750 and 1TB capacities. They’re both SATA 2’d up, and in bursts the 1TB model that we tested does actually use the bandwidth that the interface provides.

Our results from HD Tach showed that it can hit 204.1 MB/s in bursts, but its more realistic sustained throughput is 91.26 MB/s. This is thanks to its high aerial density -- which doesn’t help it’s fairly average 12.63 ms seek time, but is on par with other 7200 PRM desktop drives.

Even though you won’t see a glaring performance increase in your system if you’re running one of these (like all performance hard drives, really) you will notice little differences. Games will start faster and storage intensive apps will be snappier.

We’ve found Western Digital drives reasonably reliable (except for one batch -- the RE2 series) and this drive has an additional shroud that covers the platters to minimise vibration and improve the function of the other internals, As a result, we’d expect it an increase in longevity over older models if you did side by side tests, but can’t be sure without hearing stories from you all further down the track. We will say that it doesn’t seem to get as hot as previous models, which is a good thing.