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Western Digital Caviar Black
anyone have 1 of these? curious what you think of them! worth getting?
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anyone have 1 of these? curious what you think of them! worth getting?
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Hard drives are an intrinsically slow technology, so I don't personally use them for anything other than backup. Among 7200 RPM consumer hard drives, Western Digital's Caviar Black line is the least slow, so it's a good choice if can't afford an SSD and are going to have to run real programs off of a hard drive. My dad uses them in some of his computers (plural, as both for work and for home).
I have one and love it.
yeah i have a 6gb/s sata capability on my board, i was going to use them in together as a raid with my 3gb/s caviar blue 500gb, that would be ok wouldnt it?
one using sata 6gb and the other 3gb, in raid 0? - i confess ive never used raid before, so i am half guessing?
i have heard some people complain how loud it is though, what do you think about the noise levels while operating?
(funnily enough however my caviar blue 500gb apparently has the same db output on paper and it doesnt actually bother me personally, if its the same noise level)
Forget the raid like that. The drives should be matched if you are going to do that.
As to the 6GB/s, I will be very suprised if you get a benchmark that come close to that.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Meh, not sure it's really about anyone being able to afford an SSD rather than justifying the price. I mean you can get a 600gb Velociraptor for about half the price of an SSD and while the SSD offers a mild speed increase in read it's slower in writing and you sacrifice storage space. SSD's are certainly the future but they haven't come far enough along just yet.
strange but i doubt 6gb/s is literal transfer speed lol -
A VelociRaptor is a little faster than other consumer hard drives, but not a lot faster. Well, before SSDs, with the other performance numbers the same, one might have said it's a lot faster. But then SSDs broke the scale for storage performance.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6
There the WD VelociRaptor is about twice as fast as a Seagate Momentus 5400.6, which is a laptop hard drive. Twice as fast is pretty impressive when you're comparing hard drives to hard drives. But that's not what jumps out at you if you look at the graphs. 1% as fast as the faster SSDs is a lot more glaring of a difference than twice as fast as a laptop hard drive.
And for the price of a VelociRaptor, you might as well just get an SSD. For the price of the larger VelociRaptors, you might as well get both an SSD and a hard drive, and have more performance for programs where you need more performance, more capacity for bulk media stuff, and a lower total price tag.
Even if you need a lot of capacity, you don't need a big SSD. You can buy a small SSD for your OS and main programs, and a large hard drive for other, lightly accessed junk. And SSD prices are coming down. $110 for 60 GB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147062
$175 for 107 GB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233160
Again, it's a question of budget. If trying to squeeze together a gaming machine on a $600 budget, an SSD just doesn't fit, but a WD Caviar Black might. On a $1500 budget, it would be silly not to include a good SSD.
6 Gb/s is the SATA standard. For hard drives, the reason to prefer 6 Gb/s over 3 Gb/s if comparing two hard drives from the same line is that the 6 Gb/s model is newer, and might have the same capacity with fewer platters, and hence higher sequential transfer speeds. It might also have various other tweaks that the hard drive company has figured out how to do since releasing the older drive.
The SATA standard itself doesn't matter for hard drives, if the options are SATA 2 or SATA 3. If a hard drive can only read or write data at 120 MB/s even under sequential conditions at the edge of the platter, then it doesn't matter if you're capped by the SATA connection at 300 MB/s or 600 MB/s. It only matters for SSDs based on a SandForce or Marvell controller.
I got one in January for my new build and its been great so far. No complaints what so ever. Also as far as noise goes you'll only really hear it if it is doing something really demanding, so most of the time it is completely quiet, you can compare it to your 500gb blue (I used to have that as well) they're both exactly the same noise level.
Good drive I would recommend it.
thanks alot everyone! i ordered one
my pc has a windows score of
cpu 7.5
mem 7.5
vid 7.9
hdd 5.9 <-- so thats why i wanted a new hhd, and because of the fact that my 500gb is full really.
last question quickly, the faster a hdd drive is, for instance this one, would that make games perform better? or is it just for launching programs where the increased speed is utilized? like loading windows and applications faster?
how does it effect gaming, if at all?
The Windows Experience Index is not a useful hard drive benchmark. I think it just measures sequential read speeds or something like that.
Where hard drives are really slow is when you have to load a bunch of small things at once, rather than one large file. A WD Caviar Black will be less slow than most other hard drives at this. This is mainly noticeable when booting the computer, loading programs, loading zones in games, running a bunch of browser tabs at once, and other such things that put a big IOPS burden on storage.
There are a handful of games where faster storage will give you a better gameplay experience during normal gameplay, and not just shorter loading screens. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is one. Apparently Assassin's Creed 2 is another. But that only happens when a game is badly coded, and tries to load things off of storage while the game is running, and has to make other things wait on it.
i appreciate your help quiz you are very knowledgeable.
You can do this, but I don't recommend it.
Some RAID controllers have trouble with arrays if the two hard drives aren't identical (same number of platters/cylinders/etc). Most newer ones can array any old two drives without problem though, however, your performance will be capped to the slowest of the pair. You'd be gimping the Black to performing only as fast as the Blue, since it has to split reads and writes between them. The end result is likely to be faster than either drive on it's own, but not remarkably so: you could just save yourself a few bucks and get another Caviar Blue to array with it, and get near identical performance in that case.
The real reason you don't want to do this, is that RAID 0 is as unstable as they come. Yes, you get some performance benefit out of it, but your twice as likely to lose all your data: if either drive goes bad, the entire array gets trashed.
In light of recent developments with SSD, there are very few reasons why a home/gaming computer would want to use RAID 0 any longer. SSD's performance is so incredible, and they have so many other benefits that it's hard to consider traditional hard drives for anything other than just bulk storage any more.
ty mate ill just disable raid
Caviar Blacks are very great hard drives. They go into a low powered state that makes almost no sound, and they load in pretty fast and they were alot cooler then the older SATA drives I was using before. I have 2 in my machine for storage.
I use a 90GB Vertex 2 as my system drive and thats pretty fast, but I have not really noticed the benefits over a standard HDD. Then again I have 16GB of memory so once loaded, there really is not much else happening until something new needs to load.
I recieved my new HDD today guys and I can say so far i love it, its very quiet and extremnely fast. downside is, (which has nothing to do with the hdd itself) is that I had to reinstall a fresh copy of windows on it.
I was planning to use my Acronis Software to clone the drive so it would be a simple data exchange, however this did not fly, (problems.) I ended up having to start over from scratch really, and transfer some games I have on the old Caviar Blue over to my new one.
There is about 400GB I need to transfer, it will still take a bit of time to do it.. But as for the HDD itself, I am very happy with my purchase.
I can really see the difference in the response time, and Windows installed super fast on it. Basically in around 20 minutes or less.
Thanks for your advice everyone
I do have a small issue though whcih im not sure how to fix, If Quiz can jump in this thread and help me out I would appreciate that
I have my old drive, (windows is still on it) and its partitioned like this:
59GB windows
407GB game data
Now as that stands thats not a problem. Ill get to that bit in a minute. Then I had my new hdd show up in the bios, and i installed windows on it from a fresh install.
Problem is this, when I select which HDD to boot from in my bios it gives me only 1 SATA option, which is WD5000AKS (Caviar Blue), It does not show my WD1002FEX as a bootable drive.
I have to keep my other drive enabled for me to be able to boot to the new drive, There is a dual boot screen which comes up in DOS.
They both say
Windows 7
Windows 7
So I choose the top one for my new Black windows installation.
But why is that exactly? Why doesnt it show in the boot menu and my Blue does?
You'll probably have to consult your motherboard manual. BIOSes can be weird, and every vendor does theirs differently.
You've found the boot priority list in the BIOS, and the WD Caviar Black isn't an option? What exactly does it list? Mine lists my SSD, my optical drive, and a USB flash drive, and gives me three options as to what order I want the computer to try to boot from them.
Have you copied everything onto the new hard drive yet? If so, I'd try unplugging the old hard drive and seeing what happens. That won't damage anything; at worst, the system won't boot until you plug it back in.
It just isnt in the list, like i said the only hdd that shows up is my c blue.
even though my black now has windows on it as a bootable drive its not even in the list, but i check my connected sata drives and its right there. along with the blue.
so thats what i dont get. the drive works fine, but its not bootable, 'apparently' - possibly there is a conflict between the 2 drives, im not sure, or maybe by blue has become priority in the boot menu because thats what my bios is used to.*
*something tells me my last sentence is nonsense though, i used to work as a computer technitian for 2 years, but still i think you know more than me about this issue quiz, back when i worked i was used to working with ide drives and windows 95/98/mil/server/xp/vista. dont have much experience with raid or sata, but i know how it works. roughly. what else.. erm there is my black using the 6gb option in the bios, *run all hd's at 6gb's if available*
not sure if that would cause any problems as my blue isnt 6gb/s. - even that too is not the issue i think. hmm.
with that said i am lost really, i suppose i could try unplugging the other sata drive, to see what happens. in relation to that though - after i installed windows on the new drive i did take the blue off from the boot list to see if it would auto boot from the new drive, and it said invalid system disk
which makes sense. hmm. the only way to find out i think is to actually unplug the blue and see what happens.
Oh yeah! you want to know what my new 'Windows Experience Score' is?
It was 5.9 on the HDD right.
Its still 5.9! lmao
WTF right? .. ugh. Obviously the index is inaccurate.
Sorry been busy so haven't gotten back to this thread till now. My problem is still the same. I mean sure you can get an 60gb SSD for $110 and the one you listed looks nice but... it's got like what? a 250mb sustained sequental read? and 170mb write?
Why bother with that when I could simply do a raid 0 or raid 1 setup with HDD's? I mean hell 4 Samsung spinpoint f4's would give me over 1 TB of storage and give me around 640mb read and transfer rates.
I mean hell the $175 107gb one you linked only gives you 280mb read and 270mb write. If your worried about the Raid 0 setup go with a raid 1 and you still end up with 320mb read and still over 600gb of storage and your datas safe for that same $175 lol.
The value isn't there yet for SSD's lol. It wasn't an opinion. For the same money or less you can outperfom the SSD's WHILE keeping nice storage capacity. On a budget of $1500 that money that could be spent on an SSD is better spent on other more worth while components.
I mean sure SSD's are the future, but as I said before they simply aren't the present. The value just isn't there especially when I can get better results for less. When a single SSD costs more than a raid o or raid 1 setup using 4 HDD's and still can't out perfom them well... then you have a problem.
I'm glad you like SSD's and do know that I like the idea of them, but they aren't all that yet especially Value wise.
Then of couse my problem is this... is booting windows a bit faster really all that important to me? Having all that read and write speed doesn't make that much of a difference realistically not for your every day joe. We don't exactly need military grade durrability or read and write speed to play Rift, WoW, AoC, Aion, Etc. and we certainly don't need it to chat on this forum lol. What needed advantage does the SSD or the 4 HDD raid 0 or raid 1 setup give?
I have owned several caviar blacks over the years. I have never heard one. My guess is that some people get defective drives. Even when I worked at a computer store and built 30 pc's a week with caviar blacks, I never heard one of those either.
Your drive is not showing up as a bootable device yet you say it works? Realyl the only test is to unplug the non black drive and install an os on the WD black. If the drive, cable, sata port work, then it has to be a bios setting. Perhaps it is a quirky ahci setting, but typically that only comes into play when you install an OS on a drive that has already had a MBR. It sees the drive in bios but then does not recognize the drive on install. Toggle AHCI and you can then unallocate/install.
I agree that SSD's are not worth the money on desktops. Typically people that rave about the performance increase have a very "Crappy" computer. They then say that the SSD was the best single upgrade they have ever purchased. I would then argue that if you really notice a huge difference, it is time to buy a new cpu/mobo and preferrably spend more than 200 bucks on the pair.
I do own many SSD's. I do not notice any performance increase really. My windows boots up fast. But it boots maybe 2 seconds slower on my HDD. im a computer snob though, so if it is the most expensive cpu/ram/mobo/ vid card combo out right now.... I own it. I just stopped buying ssd's.
The only place I have truly found for SSD is laptop. Not for the performance increase, but for the fact that I can really mishandle my laptop with out the worry of breaking my HDD and getting the dreaded no OS found or stop 7b errors.
Definitely agree on them being great for laptops. There's always that akward nail biting silence when one hits the ground when it has an HDD and not a SSD lol.
Here's what you're not catching. You're focusing on sequential transfer speeds. Sequential transfer speeds don't matter. That's a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one. Everything is fast at sequential transfer speeds, except for external USB 2.0 hard drives, USB flash drives, and some other things that don't get used much.
The hard drive bottleneck is small random read and write speeds, or equivalently, IOPS. As modern SSDs go, the Samsung 470 is all right. It's not blazing fast, but it's not terribly slow, either, and it does perform like a good SSD, as opposed to the st-st-stuttering JMicron junk or some of the other early SSDs. In a 4 KB random read test with queue depth 1 (e.g., Crystal Disk Mark does this), the Samsung 470 will offer about 20 MB/s. Unimpressive, right?
Consider that a relatively fast 7200 RPM consumer hard drive will struggle to each 0.5 MB/s in the same test. Note the decimal point. That's half of a MB/s.
So you say, RAID 0 will fix that? Fine then, put eight 7200 RPM hard drives in a RAID 0 array. And then in the same test, you'll still get about 0.5 MB/s. Now, at higher queue depths, you'll see some benefit from the RAID array. But the SSD will also go a lot faster at higher queue depths, too.
And it's not just a problem that two hard drives aren't enough. Make it eight hard drives, and make them 15K RPM enterprise hard drives, and small file IOPS performance still won't be in the same league as the better SSDs, even at very high queue depths.
Look at the random read and write tests that I linked above, for example. Those graphs show a WD VelociRaptor, in addition to a bunch of SSDs. And the VelociRaptor gets completely destroyed. In one of the charts, they don't even bother to list it, because its bar length would round to 0 pixels long. Make it a bunch of VelociRaptors in RAID 0 and maybe you could get the bar to at least register. But it still wouldn't be competitive.
So why does this matter? When does your hard drive make you wait? For loading one large file, it's fast. For loading hundreds of small files, it's slow. There are a number of situations where you have to read or write large numbers of small files at once, such as when loading programs, zoning in many games, or opening several web pages at once in a browser.
But it's not just the "now you only have to wait 1 second instead of 3 seconds" effect. Any little operation where the computer needs to read or write a file and then do something else will benefit from an SSD, as it will get to the something else" a little faster. For some programs, it's basically an offline equivalent of taking 100 ms off of your ping time in an online game. Or perhaps switching from a software cursor to a hardware cursor. You can't time it with a stopwatch, but the feel is clearly there.
When I use my old desktop or my office computer at work, I'm constantly like, hey, what's wrong with this, it's slow. I don't have that same problem with my netbook. And my netbook has a much slower processor (Zacate E-350 versus desktop Core 2 Duo in the two desktops). The difference? My netbook has an SSD. The difference that makes is pretty glaring.