For a good time, call Western Digital...
SSDs might be the glorious models of the storage world, flaunting their ultra-thin frames and gorgeous flash chips, but the workhorses are still around in the form of the HDD. While they might be a little hairy, swinging around a pot belly and make odd sounds every now and then they're still the best choice for storage of data in volume. Western Digital's Caviar Black boasts a gut that can fit a whopping two Terabytes of data, and the tech specs are perhaps enough to give those SSD lovers something to lust after.
Packing a 64MB read/write cache alongside a form factor of 3.5in, there are a total of four 500GB platters within the drive that allow huge amounts of storage. Surprisingly for such a large capacity, these spin at a fast 7200RPM to allow a high transfer of data. This high rotation speed translates into a low random access time of 11.9ms, very high burst speeds of 229MB/s and a decent sustained read of 118MB/s. Considering that this is a traditional hard drive, not solid state, this is a very nice read speed.
Write speeds were pretty good too, ripping through file transferring quite quickly at 68MB/s. As with any form of movement, especially when powered by electricity, there is always heat generated - but surprisingly the Caviar Black remained only warm under high use. Compared to 10,000RPM drives this is a nice change, but though the storage space in the drive remains high, the potential for a buttload of data loss is also there. As with any storage device there is the potential for failure, so keep multiple copies of your files.
The Caviar is expensive compared to other 2TB drives at $400, and while it's not SSD fast all the time it makes up for it in capacity.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012