Verdict: Black should mean best performance.
Black is considered the colour that never goes out of style, and this ethos seems to have crept into the PC industry. Now Western Digital has adopted it as branding for a new series of hard disks. The company uses colour coding for its Caviar series of hard disks - the standard Blue models; the environmentally friendly GreenPower series, and now the new Black series is intended to provide the ultimate performance for enthusiasts.
The Black disk has two processors to boost logic processing performance and 32MB of cache. Both the 750GB and the 1TB models on test in this review have three platters, so while the 750GB model packs a pedestrian 300GB onto each platter, the 1TB model has 333GB per platter, in line with Samsung's awesome 1TB SpinPoint F1.
On paper, the 1TB Black ticks all the right boxes, and the situation remained promising when we turned to the synthetic benchmark HD Tach 3 RW. On our hard disk test rig - comprising an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 with 2GB of Corsair DDR3 memory on an MSI X38 Diamond motherboard - the 1TB Black achieved an average sustained read rate of 91.9MB/sec and write speed of 81.9MB/sec. These aren't the best scores we've seen from a 7,200rpm drive, but they're still fast.
The 1TB Black was less accomplished in real-world apps. The Crysis level loaded in 37 seconds, which is competitive but not as fast as the best 7,200rpm drives, such as the cheaper SpinPoint F1. The Gimp image editing score was a disappointing 963 - WD's 640GB Caviar SE16 scored 975.
Conclusion
As the WD Caviar Black costs more than the SpinPoint F1, and the 640GB Caviar SE16 provides two-thirds of the storage of this disk for less than half the price, and offers equal or better performance, it would appear that blue is the new black.
