Western Digital 640 GB Caviar Black SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD6401AALS

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 4 x 1 inches ; 1.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B001GQYYSQ
• Item model number: WD6401AALS
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,839 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 19, 2004

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

WD Caviar Black Hard Drives – Maximum performance for power computing.

WD Caviar Black high performance 3.5-inch SATA hard drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, an integrated dual processor, and dual actuator technology for lightning-fast performance in demanding desktop, workstation, and multi-drive systems. And 640 GB capacity gives you the space you need to hold plenty of photos, videos, and files. Best of all these drives are backed by a 5-year limited warranty.

Why you should choose WD Caviar Black:

WD Caviar Black delivers industry-leading performance that's perfect for hard-core gaming and intensive photo and video editing.

Maximum performance.
Sophisticated performance enhancing features deliver the speed you need to work faster, not longer.

No compromises.
High performance, high reliability, cutting edge technology and a 5-year limited warranty make up WD Caviar Black, the ideal drive for those who demand only the best.

Award winning.
This 7200 RPM speedster is at the top of its class when it comes to performance and reliability.

Features at a glance Industry-leading performance 640 GB of desktop storage SATA 3 Gb/s interface Dual processor technology 5-year limited warranty

Ideal for:

• Power computing applications such as intensive photo or video editing
• Maxed out gaming systems
• Adding lots of storage in desktop PCs
• Adding extra storage space for photos, videos and music

Features:

SATA 3 Gb/s interface - The industry standard and most common interface.

Dual processor - Twice the processing power to maximize performance.

NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Desktop / Consumer RAID environments - WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications. (RAID-0 / RAID-1)*

*Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Blue Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD's Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.

Upgrading your drive is easy - WD Acronis TrueImage, available as a free download on the WD Support site, enables you to copy all your data to a new drive so you don't have to reinstall your operating system to get all the benefits of a new drive. Note: Bare drive does not include any cables or mounting hardware.

The WD advantage - WD puts our products through extensive Functional Integrity Testing (F.I.T.) prior to any product launch. On average, each new product goes through 600,000 hours of testing. WD also has a detailed Knowledge Base with more than 1,000 helpful articles. You can also call toll-free support 7 days per week in the U.S. and Canada. See the WD Support site for full details.

WD-certified packaging - All WD drives purchased from Amazon.com are shipped in WD-certified hard drive packaging. It is designed and fully tested to provide WD products with the highest of safety while in transit. With WD-certified packaging, you can rest assured that your WD hard drive will arrive safely, fully protected, in a non-descript, easy-open package.

Compatibility
Works with Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000, Mac and Linux operating systems.

You might also consider:

3.5-inch Internal Comparison Chart WD Caviar Blue WD Caviar Green WD Caviar Black WD VelociRaptor Value and reliability for every day computing. Cool, quiet, eco-friendly. Maximum performance for power computing. The fastest SATA hard drive on the planet.   Ideal for Family and business computing. Desktop PCs, external drives and NAS devices. Photo and video editing, and maxed out gaming systems. Performance enthusiast systems and workstations.   Capacity range 80 GB – 1 TB 320 GB – 3 TB 500 GB – 2 TB 150 GB – 600 GB   Interface SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s PATA 100 MB/s SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 6 Gb/s   Form factor 3.5-inch 3.5-inch 3.5-inch 3.5-inch   Cache 8 MB – 32 MB 16 MB – 64 MB 32 MB – 64 MB 32 MB   Limited warranty 2-year 2-year 5-year 5-year   Highest capacity         Highest performance         Photo/video editing

Product Description

WD Caviar Black high performance 3.5-inch SATA hard drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 32 MB or 64 MB cache, SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and up to 2 TB capacity for the ultimate in power computing. Backed by a 5-year limited warranty. High Performance Electronics Architecture: Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance. Colossal cache – Bigger, faster cache of up to 64 MB means faster performance. Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture: Dual actuator technology – A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy. StableTrac – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations. NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit. Massive Capacity – WD Caviar Black SATA drives are available in capacities up to 2 TB. Compatible – We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems. 5 Year Limited Warranty.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

105 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fast shipping, terrible packaging, June 27, 2009

By 

J. Padilla (Austin Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital 640 GB Caviar Black SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD6401AALS (Personal Computers)

Received hard drive in a very timely matter. The packaging was horrible ... only 2 airbags, one top of the drive the other on the side of the drive. Bottom of the drive was touching the box and the drive was sliding all over banging the 3 unprotected sides. WD specifies if approved packaging is not used then it will void the warranty. I seriously doubt this is approved packaging. I did not even try to use the drive, I immediately RMA'ed it back to amazon. Drives shipped in this manor do not last long. I usually buy from the egg place but according to their reviews they also ship with poor packaging and have constant DOA drives. I posted a "customer" image of what the packaging looked like.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WD 640 Black fastest 7200 RPM drive on the planet, February 5, 2009

By 

D. W. Dallam "DW" (California, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital 640 GB Caviar Black SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD6401AALS (Personal Computers)

These drives have been tested to be the fastest 7200 RPM drives on the market. If you do a search, you'll find tests that compare the 640 black to the Raptor, and they are within 10% or less of the speed of the raptor, and on some tests, pretty much dead even.

This review compares the Raptor 150 to the 640 Black, and it compares everything--write, read, transfer, sustained transfer, small file copy, large file, etc:

[...]

If you buy two of these drives and run them in RAID 0, you get smokin' faster transfer rates than a single Raptor.

The upside is that this drive is 80 bucks compared to a raptor at 300. Also, the largest raptor is 300GB while this one is 640GBs. So you get 1.2TBs of space for 160.00 or about half of what a single raptor costs.

Also, the Caviar Blacks are the same build quality as the Enterprise drives, so you get the 5 year warranty. The only difference in this drive and the Enterprise drives is that the latter are tuned for RAID, while the 640 is tuned for desktop use. The tuning for RAID lowers error recovery to 7 seconds, while the error recovery on the 640, like all desktop drives, is a much longer 30+ seconds.

When using RAID, if your drive does happen to find a fault and try to recover it, after about 7 seconds the RAID controller will simply say, "Nope, bad sectors" mark the sectors bad and keep going. They are tuned this way to maximize performance on high volume servers where speed is more important than waiting for a non RAID drive to recover information. Other than that, there is virtually no speed difference between this drive and its Enterprise equivalent.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible speed for the price, March 19, 2009

By 

S. Jentsch (United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Western Digital 640 GB Caviar Black SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD6401AALS (Personal Computers)

This drive was highly recommended as the fastest drive available before going up to the 10krpm Velociraptor series, and after putting both in my system, I believe the claims are true.

This drive runs quietly, where I can't even hear drive accesses like I can with other drives. That's one of the most noticeable differences between this and the Velociraptor, aside from the speed, of course.

So, what is the speed difference between this Caviar Black drive and the Velociraptor? I ran HD Tune 2.55 to find out.

The test system was a brand new Core i7-920 based system using an ASUS P6T-Deluxe motherboard with on-board SATA. The 300GB Velociraptor is installed as the system drive, the 640GB Caviar Black as the data drive.

Caviar Black 640GB:
50 MB/s min, 109.4 MB/s max, 85.8 MB/s average
Access Time: 12.3ms
Burst Rate: 127 MB/s

Velociraptor 300GB:
74.6 MB/s min, 120 MB/s max, 100.9 MB/s average
Access Time: 8.6ms
Burst Rate: 188.3 MB/s

While the max rates are very close, you'll notice that the min rates are quite different, and the burst rate is even more so.

To put these tests into perspective, I also ran HD Tune on my previous system, which is a Pentium 4 3.06GHz Windows XP box with an 80GB Seagate IDE system drive and a 500GB Seagate ST3500641AS SATA drive for data.

I won't even post the 80GB's numbers because they are too pathetic and the technology it's based on is outdated, but I think a comparison to the SATA drive is apt because many people might have such a drive and may be contemplating the value of a replacement/upgrade.

Seagate 7200.9 500GB:
30.2 MB/s min, 61.3 MB/s max, 48.8 MB/s average
Access Time: 14ms
Burst Rate: 97.3 MB/s

As you can see, the new Caviar Black drive outpaces the older Seagate by a wide margin. An almost 76% increase in average speed, coupled with 14% better access times, makes for an upgrade that is going to be noticeable in disk-instensive operations, provided the rest of the system is not a bottleneck.

Bottlenecks are exactly what I didn't want in my new system. The Velociraptor came highly recommended by a local system builder that I trust, as he said that with the new systems he was building, the hard drive was fast becoming the bottleneck. Based on these tests and my usage of the new machine, I have every confidence that he was correct.

I decided to go with the Velociraptor for my system drive because I wanted the fastest drive possible, especially for quick accesses. While I could have gone with a second Velociraptor for the data drive, I wanted more storage space and lower cost.

While breaking in my system, I used both HD Tune's error scan function and Windows 7's thorough chkdsk routines several times. These tests took several hours to run, and I ran them directly after installation, and then after transferring about 300GB of data to the drive. No problems have been found in any of those tests.

I hoped that the Caviar Black was the bang-for-the-buck alternative, and I believe that was a wise choice. The Caviar Black 640GB drive represents a great value and delivers terrific performance.