Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB review

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Verdict:

It's not the cheapest 2TB disk, but if you want fast performance, this is the drive to buy

Review Date: 13 Dec 2012

Price when reviewed: £118

Buy it now for: £121
(see more store prices)

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

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

User Rating

ExpertReviews Award

Two-terabyte disks are the sweet spot between price and capacity right now and are ideal for media-hungry PC users, either as a system disk or as a data disk alongside a fast boot SSD. The Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB isn’t the cheapest 2TB disk on the market at 6p per GB, but it has a reassuring five-year warranty and did well in our transfer speed tests.

Our large file transfers produced an average throughput of 133MB/s, with 135.2MB/s write and 130.8MB/s read speeds. Its average small file transfer speed of 68MB/s is also pretty decent, if not exactly record-beating, and its 65.2MB/s write and 70.7MB/s read speeds are consistent with that. Overall, compared to the competition, the Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB is a fast hard disk.

It's nowhere near as cheap as the Seagate Barracuda 2TB, which costs just £71 - that's a little more than 3p per GB. However, the Western Digital disk is twice the Seagate's speed in small-file transfer tests, making it much more suitable as a system disk. This quality performance, in combination with the disk's by no means unreasonable price, makes the Caviar Black 2TB our Best Buy 2TB hard disk.

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