My WD Caviar Black is slower than blue?

[Guest]

Hello,

I recently purchased a new Western Digital Caviar Black based on positive reviews and benchmarks with good results. After getting it i ran an HD tune benchmark on it expecting it to be a little faster than my caviar blue drive i am currently using as my OS drive. I found that on transfer rates it is actually a little slower. Although slower by a very very small amount, I thought i would be seeing a nice increase in speeds with the black, but the fact that it is slower puzzles me.

I'm Not too bothered if it is normal for drives to vary in manufacturing, I was just wondering if that is the case? and i havent got a defective drive that will die on me.

I'm probably just paranoid but thanks for any input.

Caviar Blue:


Caviar Black:

 

[silky salamandr]

Yeah mane dont believe the hype on these black drives. I have a 750 black that I bought cause all the hype. They talk it up with its dual processors and 32mb cache and It made me say wow I need to buy this drive to run my win7 off of. Got it from newegg on a crazy deal and hooked it up and ran hd tune to see how fast this drive was compared to my seagate 7200.12 1tb. I was laughing that my seagate was faster than this black drive everyone cant stop talking about.

So in the real world I have found that there is really no noticiable perfromance difference in drives with 16mb/32mb cache or green drives and power hungry drives.

So the lesson is just buy a drive thats the cheapest and on you trust and all the fine print may not matter for what your using it for. Like I wouldnt use a green drive as an os drive and so on.

 

[ncc74656]

i bought a green 1TB WD from BB was 80 bucks employee. I benched it at my house and got about 87Mbps average read. later that week i installed a black 1TB on a customers computer and reran the bench to compare, i was thinking of exchanging my green... the black came out at 89Mbps average read... it was some really disappointing results.

 

[cjl]

Yeah mane dont believe the hype on these black drives. I have a 750 black that I bought cause all the hype. They talk it up with its dual processors and 32mb cache and It made me say wow I need to buy this drive to run my win7 off of. Got it from newegg on a crazy deal and hooked it up and ran hd tune to see how fast this drive was compared to my seagate 7200.12 1tb. I was laughing that my seagate was faster than this black drive everyone cant stop talking about.

So in the real world I have found that there is really no noticiable perfromance difference in drives with 16mb/32mb cache or green drives and power hungry drives.

So the lesson is just buy a drive thats the cheapest and on you trust and all the fine print may not matter for what your using it for. Like I wouldnt use a green drive as an os drive and so on.

The 7200.12 is a newer design than the Caviar Black - there's no surprise that it's faster.

Honestly, the Caviar Black drives are excellent. I have one (1TB), and I love it, but don't expect them to radically outperform other 7200rpm drives of the same generation. They all work in about the same way, and as a result, they'll all perform fairly close.

 

[cjl]

i bought a green 1TB WD from BB was 80 bucks employee. I benched it at my house and got about 87Mbps average read. later that week i installed a black 1TB on a customers computer and reran the bench to compare, i was thinking of exchanging my green... the black came out at 89Mbps average read... it was some really disappointing results.

The greens are quite a bit slower on access time though.

 

[Guest]

So i take it it's normal for speeds on the same type of drive to vary a bit due to manufacuring? even beating out an older design same capacity drive from the same company and same 'caviar' line?

I was just wondering if it's normal and i wont see any unexpected failures or something down the line in this new drive, thats the main thing.

 

[cjl]

Yep - you should be fine.

 

[jitpublisher]

I concur, I bought a 1TB black drive because of all the hype about how fast they were as well. The 320gig SATA II Seagate in the rig before the Black Edition had benched nearly the same transfer rates, and had faster access times!
The drive is a nice drive, there is no doubt. Lots of storage, decent speed, quiet, and a fair price. But the black edition drives are not going to amaze you with blinding speed if you have been using SATA 7200 drives in the past. I think most of the people who brag these up must have upgraded from older ATA66 drives or something.

 

[xsever]

I have 2 WD drives. One is a 1TB Black and the second is a 750GB Green.

Here are my numbers if you wish to compare:

1TB Black: Min:55.9 Max: 110.2 Avg: 90.8 Access Time: 12.2 Burst:142.2
750GB Green: Min: 40.9 Max: 91.7 Avg: 73 Access Time: 14.1 Burst: 148

I have realized that as the drive gets filled, the burst rate gets the biggest hit. It seems there's an exponential relationship there.

What do you guys think?