Western Digital Caviar Black (750GB) review

£87
Price when reviewed

Caviar Black drives are Western Digital’s flagship models, and the list of features doesn’t disappoint. Every drive boasts 32MB of cache, and this is joined by features to prevent platters wearing out and knocks damaging the disk.

Western Digital Caviar Black (750GB) review

This 750GB model also uses a trio of 250GB platters, mimicking the arrangement seen in the 750GB Samsung SpinPoint F1 (see p78).

Performance, though, doesn’t measure up: in our read and write tests the Caviar Black returned figures of 92MB/sec and 85.6MB/sec – not bad by any means, but not in the same league as the superb SpinPoint.

Other results weren’t quite good enough – the Caviar Black’s burst and average sequential read speeds were beaten by the 750GB Samsung.

The Caviar Black can’t fall back on good value for money, either – its cost of 10.8p/GB pales in comparison with the 8p/GB of the SpinPoint. So unless you think the premium features are worth the extra, there’s little reason to buy this drive.

Specifications

Capacity 750GB
Hard disk usable capacity 698GB
Hard disk type Mechanical
Cache size 32MB
Spindle speed 7,200RPM
Seek time (ms) 12ms
Cost per gigabyte 10.8p

Noise and power

Idle power consumption 750W

Performance tests

HD Tach burst speed 216.4MB/sec
HD Tach random access speed 11.7ms
HD Tach average sequential read speed 97.5MB/sec

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