Hardware Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black Review

Sorry, but that did make me laugh!

Not really your day today with this was it...

 

haha brilliant

 

When working on a feature (or several features, depending on how you multi-task), you have to understand that uncompressed DV film takes up tons of space. Depending on bit rate and frame speed, an hour of uncompressed footage from a DV cam can take up over 400GB of space. Granted, my example is niche, but it's still fair to point out potential uses for a drive such as this rather than limiting the mindset of the review to, "How useful is this to the average user?"

 

yeah good for video editors

 

This is a fair point, but I disagree really. I would have been happy to see a passing comment that this would be an option only if you're considering editing hours of HD video, but really, HD video editors will know that already. Afterall, we don't see reviews of the graphics cards used for CGI on here.. for a reason.

This hard drive to me falls into my 'dumb' category as for 99% of users, there will be a better option.

Also, pulled from the first website I found selling it:

..........nah.

 

400GB for an hour of uncompressed HD footage? WOW! I had no idea.

OK, fair enough - I can see how for some this would start to make more sense now. It clearly is still a relatively niche product, but given the ubiquitousness of cheap HD camcorders in places like Currys and Dixons, (and the penchant for dad's and grandad's to shoot hours of family films) it's evidently not nearly as niche as I first thought.

I still reckon a bunch of 1TB's or 1.5TB's in a JBOD would offer far better value at the moment, but I suppose where would we be if we all thought, 'stuff innovation, I can make do with what I've got'?

I can at least see the point now....

 

I'll probably disagree with that now. I don't think most HD video editors would necessarily automatically know which HDD is best for the job, not without reviews like this.

Also, I suppose there's also the point that the cutting edge, (and overpriced) technology of today is going to be the standard kit we all have further down the line - so looking at this is really more of a glimpse at the future for most of us than a practical buying guide. (As I reckon there's a good chance more people will have 2TB HDD's as standard before they have SSD's as standard).

So maybe not a practical review for most of us, but still an interesting one.

Still looking forward to the new F3 review though!

 

I disagree. For 230 quid I'd buy four 500GB drives and RAID 0 them for a much higher throughput. It's just a splash drive, security doesn't matter so much. At the end of the session save the file to a standard drive and you're done, right?

Nice review Baz

 

I think 4 of these should keep me going for a few months. Nice review.

 

2TB HDD's are getting cheaper, still cheaper to buy two 1TB drives (only by like 20bucks)
Here in Australia 2TB HDD's are around the $235AU mark and 1TB drives are around $109AU mark.

Seems there is an 808GB drive now, interesting.

 

Good review, thank you.
Missing however performances in Databases , Souce code compiling , Others OSs Linux Mac
Hope you may consider in next benchmarks

What about reliability ? This is one reason we prefer Western Digital, such as RE3

 

Thanks for the review.

Sounds like a very impressive drive, but is just overpriced right now. Will be interesting to see how that changes.

Would be interested to see power usage compared to the green drive and others.

 

yeah just thinking of who could use that kind of storage realistically.. I don't really care for raid 0.. the odds go up something is going to fail, and 4 drives- I'm not saying your asking for it.. guys dealing with large amounts of raw footage might use raid though.. in that case, two 1tb drives would probably fit the job better

I know if I was building a cheap professional video editing rig.. probably go with two 1tb without raid- those spinpoints are cheap

 

I was wondering when this idea would be brought up. A raid array should surely theoretically be just as fast (2 1TB's with 32MB caches) or faster (4 500GB with 32MB caches) as the 2TB, it would be interesting to see a test done about this. The only concern would be about reliability...

 

Well of course, but if it's just a splash drive and not storage, less emphasis is needed on the reliability.

 

Its seems like you are all a bunch of Seagate fanbois the F3 1T gets womped by this beast and it still gets a recommended. This thing is one of the largest HDs out there and still delivers performance over many smaller drives.