Western Digital Caviar Black 4TB review

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Verdict:

Huge and massively fast but this high price lets this disk down

Review Date: 15 Dec 2012

Price when reviewed: £251

Buy it now for: £215
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.dabs.com

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

User Rating

Western Digital has been making 4TB enterprise grade hard disks for a while, but the Caviar Black 4TB, is firmly aimed at home users. It comes with a reassuring five year warranty, which you'd hope for if you're shelling out this much on a hard disk.

The disk’s performance in our throughput tests proved to be excellent, which again is much what you'd hope for from a high-end SATA3 disk with a 7,200rpm spin speed. Its large file read speed came in at 151MB/s, with a read speed of 143.5MB/s for an average of 147.3MB/s. It was very fast in our small file tests, too, with a write speed of 88.2MB/s. Although its read speed of 53.1MB/s was slower than we expected, producing an average small file throughput of 70.6MB/s.

The Caviar Black’s only real competition comes from the Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 4TB. Hitachi's storage division is now also owned by Western Digital, which means the company has the market for consumer 4TB disks more or less sewn up. Although Western Digital's 4TB disk is faster than Hitachi's, it's also significantly more expensive. Given that the 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 is no performance slouch, it's the better choice.

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