Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB review

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Verdict:

The long warranty is good to see, but the high price and slow transfer speeds let this hard disk down

Review Date: 9 Jan 2013

Price when reviewed: £68

Buy it now for: £69
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.okobe.co.uk

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

User Rating

The Western Digital Caviar Black range of hard disks is backed up by a five-year warranty, which is reassuring if you're after a storage disk for important data; remember to back up all the same, as a warranty won’t get lost data back in case of damage or failure.

The Caviar Black 1TB disk performed rather poorly in our large file transfer test, with an average throughput of just 124.6MB/s, produced by a write speed of 123.3MB/s and a read speed of 125.9MB/s. This is among the slowest large file speeds we've seen from a SATA3 hard disk.

Its performance in our small file tests was a bit better, with an average transfer speed of 58.5MB/s, write speed of 60.3MB/s and read speed of 56.7MB/s. Overall, this disk is not your best bet if fast performance if you top priority.

At almost 7p per gigabyte, this 1TB hard disk is also rather expensive. If you're after a low-cost 1TB storage or system disk, the Samsung Spinpoint F3 is a better bet, even though it’s only SATA2. Meanwhile, the Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB is only a bit more expensive and gives you twice the space, although it's slow.

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