Western Digital Black Series Review (2TB)

Western Digital’s Caviar Black drives have long been some of the fastest and most reliable consumer grade hard drives on the market, and for good reason. WD (Western Digital) has been making hard drives since the 80s and has been an industry leader since. Much of that has to do with their Caviar branding they have used since the 90s. The Caviar Black line has been around since 2008. They have been the fastest drives they sell outside of the Velociraptor series and also have the best warranty in mechanical storage. Western Digital has recently dropped the Caviar branding and is now simply calling them the Black Series drives. Although I feel many of us will call them Caviar drives out of habit. Now on to the review of the WD Black Series WD2003FZEX 2TB

WESTERN DIGITAL BLACK SERIES 2TB OVERVIEW 

WESTERN DIGITAL BLACK SERIES SPECIFICATIONS, PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

There are some new features with this drive, one of them is VCT (Vibration Control Technology) which to quote Western Digital, “…allows the disks inside the drive to adapt to any mounting problems or vibration conditions that are inside your case, resulting in increased data accuracy, performance and reliability over time.”

It also has what WD calls StableTrac, which should also help reduce vibrations even more. As well as Corruption Protection Technology (CPT), which helps reduce corruption during power failures or system instability. We can say from experience that this feature has saved multiple drives of ours in the past.

The Black Series drives are sold at a number of retailers and come in varieties of 1TB, 2TB 3TB and 4TB and are priced at $80 $140, $175 and $240 respectively.

The drives are  SATA 6 Gb/s with the standard SATA 6Gb/s connector, 3.5 inch form factor, include 4K sectors, and are rated at 164 MB/s read and write, with 64MB cache, 7200RPM disk speed, non-recoverable read errors is 1 in 10^14 bits read and include an industry leading warranty of 5 years.

Power consumption is rated at 9.5 w read/write, 8.1 w idle, 1.3 w standby/sleep. Operating temperature is 5 – 55c and the drive measures 1 x 5.7 x 4 (inches) and weighs 1.32 Pounds.