Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB review

The Caviar Blue range of hard disks have SATA II interfaces and 7,200rpm spindle speeds. The 1TB model reviewed here has 32MB of cache and uses a pair of 500GB platters. It is aimed at value-conscious buyers who want a disk for everyday use and, at just over 5p per gigabyte, it seems fairly good value. Other SATA II disks are available at the same price though, or for even less, so the Caviar Blue had to excel in our performance tests too to win an award.

The 1TB Caviar Blue did very well at copying large files. It wrote them at just under 92MB/s, which isn’t far behind the very fastest SATA II hard disks. It was one of the fastest internal hard disks we’ve seen at reading large files with a score of just less than 109MB/s. Its small files performance wasn’t as impressive. Small files were written at a sluggish 54.5MB/s and read at a slow 44MB/s. These speeds are in line with what we’d expect from a power-saving 5,400pm disk than a 7,200rpm model.

Due to this inconsistent performance, we weren’t surprised by the Caviar Blue’s time of 39 seconds taken to load our large Crysis game level. This is among the slower Crysis load times we’ve seen for an internal hard disk.

The 1TB Caviar Blue is let down by its disappointing small files performance. If it was considerably cheaper it would be a decent budget-priced disk for storing large files, such as on a media server or media centre PC. However, Samsung’s 1TB SpinPoint F3 is better all-round and it’s cheaper, too.