Western Digital Caviar Black and RE4 2TB Drives Review

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 09, 2009, 12:05 PM EDT

It happens to all of us at some point. We constantly run short of hard drive space, no matter how incredibly cavernous you thought your current drive was when you bought it. Did you really expect Dragon Age: Origins and Borderlands to soak up almost thirty gigabytes between them? Didn't think so. You either shove Office 2007 and Photoshop CS aside to make some room for your latest losslessly-ripped music and RAW photos, or grab a drive that offers up more capacity, say up to 2TB--such as the ones we're going to be evaluating here.

You know the contenders. These aren't solid state drives full of a speedy but thimble-sized flash memory chips--these are large, succulent drives with platters humming at 7200rpm and they're made by Western Digital.

Taken to task today we have three drives in total: the Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB which we'll use as a reference point, and two relatively new offerings from WD: The RE4 2TB drive and the Caviar Black 2TB. Which of the three drives outperformed the others? There was a clear winner, and that particular drive is an absolute speed demon...

Western Digital Caviar Black and RE4 2TB Drives Review

Tags: Western Digital, Caviar, HD, Storage, WD, 2TB, Drives

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com