I don't get WD Black drives

[TheGreatSatan]

Why exactly are Western Digital black drives so special? What makes them supposedly better than normal hard drives that spin at 7200rpm's?

[mDust]

Why exactly are Western Digital black drives so special? What makes them supposedly better than normal hard drives that spin at 7200rpm's?

They're higher performance than WD blue drives, which are higher performance than WD green drives. The black drives have larger and faster cache and other electronic goodness built in that the others don't.

[x88x]

I believe the 'other electronic goodness' involves such things as redundant controllers, and a different controller chip (well, chips since they're redundant) than the Blue series.

[SXRguyinMA]

/\ This. The green's are the eco-drives. usually 5x00 rpm or even variable rpm for energy savings. the blue's are the standard drives, usually 7200 rpm with 16mb cache's, and the black's are the high performance drives (a step below the raptor's), with 7200rpm and 32mb cache, plus all the goodies mentioned above

from here (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/251151-32-caviar-blue-green-black)

Performance. The Black is optimized for performance at the expense of noise and power consumption, the blue is a general use drive, designed to be a good balance of performance, power consumption, and noise, and the green is designed to use as little power and make as little noise as possible at the expense of performance.

another link:
http://www.storagereview.com/wd_announces_caviar_black


Western Digital this week announced its latest drive, another terabyte drive. Unlike the firm's 1 TB Caviar GP, however, the new Caviar Black features just 3 platters a la the Samsung SpinPoint F1 and a 7200 RPM spindle speed. WD has also finally upped its largest buffers to 32 megabytes.

With this announcement, the manufacturer has segmented its products into three separate lines. The standard "SE16" line segues into the "Blue" line whereas the GP units become the "Green" units. "Black" appears to be a banner under which the firm will unite technologies sought by performance enthusiasts. This particular drive, for example, trumpets its areal density and buffer size.

Most exciting to us, however, are the areal-density-specific part numbers that will accompany the Black series. It seems WD has finally acknowledged that enthusiasts want to know exactly what revision or generation of drive they're getting as opposed to a generic "xxxx GB" unit...

[TheGreatSatan]

OK, I guess I should've stated that I already know about the other drives. What makes black drives better than a 7200rpm Seagate or Hitachi or Samsung or whatever? All of which have 32MB cache

[x88x]

What makes black drives better than a 7200rpm Seagate or Hitachi or Samsung or whatever? All of which have 32MB cache

They're not inherently better than those, any more than those are inherently better than each other. In fact, last I checked, some Samsung drives were soundly trouncing most of the WD Black drives.

If you like, think of the Black series as the old Caviar line and the Blue series as a budget, feature-cut version. The Black series gets the new tech (new controller chips, bigger caches, higher density platters, etc) before the Blue line, that's all. It's not like the Raptor and Velociraptor lines where WD specifically went out to make a high performance drive or the RE series where they specifically went out to make a high-reliability drive (now that I think about it, the RE series are the ones with redundant controllers, not the Black series). They just took their existing product line and cut it in half, probably so that the low-end Caviar (now Blue) and the high-end Caviar (now Black) drives would be more clearly differentiated. ...then made a clever marketing play to make it seem like the Black drives were new and better. :P

[Lothair]

It's a matter of personal preference, nothing more. Everyones experience with different brands are, well, different. So just buy the brand you like best.

WD Black does seem to be the most popular though. How that came to be probably has to do with something. I'm not going to say what, since people like to argue that reason. :p

[DrkSide]

Besides the performance difference between the Blacks, Blues, and Greens the only other difference I see is the warranty. The black drives offer a 5 year and the blue and green drives offer a 3 year.

[x88x]

It's a matter of personal preference, nothing more.

Not so. If you check out reviews of various drives on sites like tomshardware where they compare them to others, there is a big difference between models and lines. There area lot of traits that affect performance, chief among them being rotational speed, cache size, platter density, and interface speed. For example, when Samsung came out with their 1TB Spinpoint F3, it was the only drive on the market with 500GB platters. As a result, even though they only had a 16MB cache they wiped the floor with just about every other drive on the market. IIRC, the only one at the time that beat it was the 2TB WD Black, mostly because of its efficient controller chip and (iirc) 64MB cache.

[Lothair]

March 31, 2010. Pictures taken from storagereview.com (http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_black_review_2tb). They didn't test a Samsung model, but they did test it up against a Seagate. I personally don't see any considerable difference, which is why I say it's just a matter of taste in brand. Although, the WD Black does technically perform better.

http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/4162/wdcaviarblack2tb2mbsequ.png

http://i.imgur.com/HiYa5.png

http://i.imgur.com/hmshZ.png

http://i.imgur.com/dBVlI.png

http://i.imgur.com/kiSmu.png

(And on an unrelated note. Imgur is freaking awesome compared to Imageshack. Where have I been hiding for the past year or two? The URL is short, the website is clean, simple, fast and attractive and it doesn't have pop-ups of any kind. Nice.)

[Lothair]

Here we go. This is a better comparison, I think. Again, the WD is technically better in pretty much every category, but the difference is pretty small, isn't it? I mean would you notice the difference in real world usage without benchmarking software?

http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/suite_v4.php?typeID=10&testbedID=4&osID=6&raidconfigID=1&numDrives=1&devID_0=368&devID_1=361&devID_2=354&devCnt=3

[x88x]

I've also noticed the 2TB drives seem to provide similar performance across the board, probably because they're all the cutting edge of the respective companies (highest platter density, biggest cache, etc) and so tend to have similar components most of the time. The 2TB WD RE4 was, iirc, the first drive on the market with a 64MB cache; the 2TB Green was the first drive on the market with 500GB platters; the 2TB Samsung F4 was the first drive with 666GB platters; the 3TB WD Green was the first (and only, so far) with 750GB platters. The difference is more pronounced in the smaller (cheaper) models, and whenever a new tech is introduced (like the 500GB platters I mentioned earlier). The problem is that there really hasn't been much in the way of really innovative tech development in the HDD world over the last 5 years or so; just improvements on existing tech. I think the last big jump was vertical bit storage on the platters...in 2004 (iirc). :P Granted, we've come a long way since then, but just shrinking stuff, nothing revolutionary. No, strike that; as I was typing that I remembered the changes that enabled WD's 3TB drive. Increasing the block size let them waste a lot less space, but also requires using UEFI controllers, which aren't exactly prevalent at the moment (which is why they bundled one with each drive). Even that, though, has been around for a while, and the theory has been well developed, just nobody wanted to make the leap, and it wasn't really needed until we hit the ~2.2TB mark.

BTW, that comparison is over a year old; all three of those companies have since gone through at least one product generation, if not two or three.