Windows 7 Western Digital Cavier Black with 64mb cache

[Highwayman]

I've been in the market for a new hard drive to replace my humble set of Seagate class 10, 7200rpm Sata300 drives, so recently after a look around I decided to put my money on the recent Cavier Black 1TB with it's huge 64mb cache and twin 500gig platters.

I did consider the far cheaper similar specced 'Green' edition but since that only has a measly 5200rpm spin rate it's more suited for general storage than for performance junkies that can't quite justify the price tags on superfast SSDs or 10,000rpm Raptors, of which neither type offer decent capacity no matter how fast they are just yet.

So with that in mind the 1TB 7200rpm Cavier Black WD1002FAEX was what I opted for, and it comes with a Sata 600 interface that helps to future proof a little, but ultimately pointless as the drive could never support even the full bandwidth of Sata300, but anyway it's good average seek times and dual controller cpu of the 2TB edition sounded like a good bit of kit to me, so blagged one the other day, and I'm now awaiting delivery as we speak sometime today.... and I'm getting ready to reinstall windows to the new drive, reassigning the old Seagates for mere backup storage, although tempted to RAID 0 them, i've not had good experiences in the past due to somewhat flakey power grid which craps the idea of using RAID arrays without a UPS.

Obviously it's too soon to give any impressions on the performance increases but in a few days time I'll have benched quite a few of my games to see if theres much noticable improvement. In the meantime I'm asking all you forum chaps and lasses out there to post your thoughts, and hopefully good experiences if you have this or the siblings of this generation of drive.


Here's a pic off the web for those who like that sort of thing.

 

[Digerati]

i've not had good experiences in the past due to somewhat flakey power grid which craps the idea of using RAID arrays without a UPS.

All computers should be on a good UPS with AVR anyway, regardless the reliability of the grid. If you have a hair dryer, toaster, microwave oven, refrigerator, water cooler, air conditioner, space heater, coffee pot, or any other high wattage appliance in your home or office, they all send anomalies down the line every time they cycle on and off. The chances one may send an extreme anomaly, especially with something like a $15 1500W hair dryer made in China, are very high. If you live in an apartment building, the risks are multiplied many times over. A surge and spike protector is little more than a fancy and expensive extension cord that does absolutely nothing for low voltage events, and merely chops (clamps) off the tops of the sinewaves for high voltage events, leaving the cleaning up (and extra heat producing work) to the PSU and motherboard regulator circuits. You need a good UPS with AVR to smooth them all out. Battery backup in the event of a complete power outage is only the icing on the cake.

Plus, a decent sized UPS will not only protect your computer, but you LCD monitor (or monitors), PDA, phone, and all your network hardware too.

 

[Highwayman]

Yea a UPS is certainly something I need, maybe once I upgraded to a bigger monitor I'll consider one... the only problem being I don't want something the size of a car battery whirring away in the background...so what's the options?

 

[Digerati]

Well, you are not going to get away from having a big block the size of a big car battery sitting about. Actually, in the wintertime, mine makes a nice foot warmer! And not all make noise either. My Link Removed is big (12"h x 4"w x 15"d - closer to 17" deep onces the power cables are connected). But it has no fans so it is totally silent. And it powers and protects my Core i7 with 8Gb of RAM and GTX260 graphics card, cable modem, wireless router, Ethernet switch, USB hub, card reader, Palm PDA cradle, phone, and two 22" LCD widescreen monitors.

The biggest downside to a UPS is the batteries need to be replaced about every 3 years. But that is typically very easy to do.

 

[Highwayman]

well i'd guess that's on the to do list once got about £150 spare...lol

 

[Highwayman]

Well a week on, and another LAN party under my belt, and can happily report there is a noticable increase in general windows performance with the new WD drive, score an extra point on window index scores... woot! although decided to Raid-0 up my old twin HD drives for just a dedicated games drive which seems to be working well averaging around 130mb access speeds, just hope by using that for stuff that primarily reads only it'll stave off the blackout demons.

My only niggle with the 1TB 7200rpm Cavier Black WD1002FAEX is it's much louder on accessing than my Seagate drives on loading windows although not so much noise when all loaded up doing general accessing, but i suppose I can always get some noise dampening kit for that.