Caviar Black worth the extra cash?

nails666 · 24 Aug 2011 at 12:32

Hi,
I'm looking to get a new applications drive for my pc as my aging 320gb drive is now bursting at the seams. I currently have an SSD for my boot drive and a NAS box for all my media, backups etc so this drive will be used mainly for games and applications that are too big for the SSD.
I'm looking at 1tb drives and am wondering if the WD Caviar Black drive is really worth an extra £20 over the Caviar Blue or Spinpoint F3 drives? I do have a SATA-3 motherboard so in real world use will I notice much performance improvement in load times etc with the Black?

Many Thanks,

Ross

Evoss · 24 Aug 2011 at 12:41

Nope, got for a Samsung F3 1TB, just as fast, more quiet and much cheaper.

Surveyor · 24 Aug 2011 at 13:22

+1 to the Samsung F3 1TB.

7,200-RPM terabytes from Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD face off

We're left with Samsung's Spinpoint F3, which is our clear favorite of the four. Not only does the F3 offer the best performance in all manner of sequential transfers, it's easily the quietest of the drives overall. I'm not thrilled by the fact that the F3's transaction rates drop off after 32 concurrent I/O requests, but that's not a condition many desktop users are likely to face. Besides, the Spinpoint certainly held its own in our disk-intensive multitasking tests, which are far more indicative of the sort of workloads produced by enthusiast desktops. Samsung doesn't give up much ground to the Caviar when it comes to random access times, either.

SATA 3 makes absolutely no difference with a mechanical HDD. They don't even come close to saturating the bandwidth of SATA 2.

The only real advantage of the WD Black is the 5 year warranty.

nails666 · 24 Aug 2011 at 13:38

Thanks for that, I'll save myself the £20 and get the Samsung then.

smilertoo · 25 Aug 2011 at 15:59

Arnt the caviar black supposed to be better built or less likely to die on you.

Surveyor · 25 Aug 2011 at 17:29

smilertoo said:
Arnt the caviar black supposed to be better built or less likely to die on you.

Are they?

I've seen no evidence which would support that.

I've seen a couple of threads with failed Samsung F3's but also threads with failed WD Blacks:

Hard (drive) failure

I'm guessing that a lot more Samsung F3's are sold than WD Blacks, so you would expect to see more overall failures, but I'm not aware that a higher proportion fail.