Specification Review Between Caviar Black and RE4 2TB also compares with Seagate Barracuda
It happens to all of us at some point. We constantly run short
of hard drive space, no matter how incredibly cavernous you thought your
current drive was when you bought it. Did you really expect Dragon Age: Origins
and Borderlands to soak up almost thirty gigabytes between them? Didn't think
so. You either shove Office 2007 and Photoshop CS aside to make some room for
your latest losslessly-ripped music and RAW photos, or grab a drive that
offers up more capacity, say up to 2TB--such as the ones we're going
to be evaluating here.
You know the contenders. These aren't solid state drives full of a speedy but
thimble-sized flash memory chips--these are large, succulent drives with
platters humming at 7200rpm and they're made by Western Digital.
Taken to task today we have three drives in total: the Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB
which we'll use as a reference point, and two relatively new offerings from WD:
The RE4 2TB drive and the Caviar Black 2TB. Which of the three drives
outperformed the others? There was a clear winner, and that particular drive is
an absolute speed demon.
 |
| WD Caviar Black |
 |
| WD RE4 |
Western Digital's spec sheets didn't specify seek times, but we'll
figure them out via benchmarks. Looking at the specs, we can see that besides
the difference in capacity, the most glaring difference between the WD drives
and the Seagate drive is the cache. Will a double-sized cache make the WD
drives perform better? We aim to find out.
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