Customer Reviews

Western Digital WD2001FASS 2 TB Caviar Black SATA 3 GB/s 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I have been waiting ages for a large capacity hard drive that runs at 7,200rpm and this Caviar black has most definitely answered my call.

Lets look at the technical specs first... As Borat would say, They're very nice! (bet you didn't expect a lame Borat reference did you?)
It features: Two Processors, Four 500GB platters, 64MB of cache and a dual mode actuator system that, (to make a long story short) enables precision head tracking that speeds up your seek times. Plus like most Western Digital hard drives, this one features a No-Touch loader, meaning the read and write head never comes in contact with any of the platters, increasing the life span of the hard drive.

Now to benchmarks. (all testing performed on an Intel 2.4Ghz Q6600 paired with XFX 780i Sli Mobo and recorded in HDTach)
First off, this thing has the fastest sustained writes and reads of any standard magnetic drive I've used. (or heard of for that matter) Mine exceeded 113MB/s each compared to my previous 1.5TB Barracuda that scored 99MB/s sustained reads and 84MB/s sustained writes. That gives the Caviar Black about 16 and 30 percent faster sustained reads and writes respectively!

Random Access Reads and Writes were also faster for the Caviar Black at 7.4ms and 5ms respectively. Compared to the Barracuda's 12.9 and 5.4.

Burst Read speeds for the Caviar Black were 215.1MB/s compared to the Barracuda's 209.1MB/s

Also, just for fun I compared the Caviar Black's benchmarks against my 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor. (Thinking the VelociRaptor would totally own it) I was pretty shocked at the results.

Raptor sustained read/write: 99.1MB/s and 98.2MB/s
Caviar sustained read/write: 113.3MB/s and 113.1MB/s (It actually beat it)

Raptor random access read/write: 7.3ms and 3.3ms
Caviar random access read/write: 7.5ms and 4.9ms (Pretty close here)

Raptor Burst read: 250.3MB/s
Caviar Burst read: 215.1MB/s (O well, can't win em all ;)

Not bad considering this thing is running about 27 percent slower than the Raptor. :D

Bottom line is, the Caviar Black 2TB is a hard drive running nearly as fast (or faster) than a VelociRaptor for about only a hundred bucks more and its six and a half times the capacity. Is it worth it to you? I think it is, the price will only drop in time to come but with this size and these speeds even at the $299msrp I don't think the Caviar Black 2TB's value can be beat at the moment.

Its not often that I take the time to write a review on a product, but I had to do it for this drive. I have been in the IT field for over 20 years and though I have seen it all.

I purchased 3 of the 2TB Black drives in the last month. One here on Amazon and the rest, somewhere else. Out of the 3, 1 was DOA, 2nd died in 3 hours and the last, had so many bad sectors that WD's own software ran for 13 hours and it finally gave up and errored out. This is completely unacceptable in this day and age. How can they be releasing 3TB drives when they have huge issues with the 2TB offerings. It almost seems like they are having problems with the latest batch reading through some review on other sites. I also purchased a couple of the 640GB drives and these Im extremely happy with. Even the 2TB Green drives have been good to me. Out of the 8 that I purchased this year, only one had to be replaced, which I consider acceptable.

Thankfully, WD's RMA process is painless, but there is a catch. When you receive your replacement drive, it only comes with a 90-Day Warranty. WD, can explain this to me. How can you reduce the warranty on this drive from 5 years to 90 days when its your QC issues that are causing this high of a failure rate that makes the IBM Deathstar look good.



If you are looking for 2TB drives that will not be used in a RAID environment, check out the 2TB Green drives, or even Hitachi.

This hard drive came basically loose in a box and was rattling around. Upon opening the box I found another box. Inside the second box was a hard drive that was basically loose. The second box was constructed in a way that, if it had been made of quality materials may have held the hard drive securely. But because of the cheapness of the construction, it had completely failed (tiny cardboard tabs were supposed to be in tiny slots but weren't) thereby releasing the hard drive so that it could bounce freely around in every direction with every drop or bang.

I will *not* consign 2 terabytes of data to a drive that has been shipped improperly and outside of Western Digital's shipping specifications. Hard drives consist of moving parts that must operate at high speeds for years with only microns of tolerance. The *last* thing a hard drive needs is to be banged about for days in a poorly packaged box. I will never buy a hard drive from Amazon again unless it is a retail drive that has been packed securely by the manufacturer.

I have no choice but to return the drive in the same crumby box it came in. This means that Amazon, after they receive it, will then ship this drive which has traveled in two directions back to some customer (possibly you) for whom it will probably fail.

There is a retailer (with two zs and an f in its name)that ships hard drives properly in a secure foam insert which surrounds the drive on all six sides. They are a little more expensive than Amazon, but at least if there is a problem with the drive..it won't be because of negligent shipping practices.

BTW, almost *all* of the large online retailers participate in this folly. Anytime you read reviews of a drive and see lots of DOAs *and* complaints about the packaging you can put two and two together.

Oh....also.....I have one of these drives I ordered from the retailer who ships them properly and it is a great drive!

2TB capacity, large cache, high performance, for under $200...actually almost $150 these days? Hard to believe.

I gave it a try and bought 2 of them. They seemed good for 2-3 months, then I started to get SMART monitoring errors...hrm, ok well, they were in a s/w raid1 array and western digital claims the drives should not be placed in any raid configuration.

OK - reconfigure the drives to run as single units and follow best practices/etc. Drive 1 dies a few weeks later. WD replaces it easily with a newer version w/ a much higher serial number (the original was very low so I might have gotten some of the first production batches).
That drive is now running fine, w/o any real issues, although the SMART load_cycle_count has been increasing faster than it should which could be fixed for most controllers, but not w/ the 3ware JBOD controller I'm using. Hrm...well, it might fail a few years down the line and I'll deal with it then. WD does have a 5yr warranty.

Drive 2 fails about 6 months after purchase. Monitoring picks up huge numbers of offline uncorrectable errors. This drive also had a very low serial number so it could have been suffering initial production problems. RMA'd easily. However, WDC sent out a "recertified" drive with a modestly low serial number and this drive is reporting errors within days of install.

I have 5 of the WDC enterprise RE4 drives installed for ~6months w/o any issues (smart reports show wonderful health) and the only drives I've had issues with are the caviar blacks which are tending towards 150% failure rate... I'm going to try upgrading the SATA cable of the current problematic drive.

Going forward, for WDC SATA, I'll only be buying the RE4's. No more caviar black.

I ponied up for the more expensive drive in WD's line thinking it would be money well spent, and I'm not convinced it was worth it. My Mac Pro has seemed very slow and buggy ever since installing this drive (one of three drives I have installed). The drive actually crashed a week after installing it. A reformat fixed it, but I had to reinstall everything which set me back a decent amount of time. I have it dedicated as a drive just for photos, no applications or OS. It takes a noticeable amount of time to wake up and read what I'm looking for.
I have had one weird thing after another pop up since I installed this drive. I'm close to sending it back to get something else, even if it costs me more.

The drive mounted ok and the read/write was acceptable but OMG the thing sounded like a pack of mice were inside gnawing metal. There was such a huge grinding of metal on metal I'm sure it's defective. It's going back.

Bought two; one failed within a week. Need to pay ~$7 to ship it back to WD for replacement.

Don't buy the 2TB (WD2001FASS) version.

I've only had this drive a month or so, so obviously I can't speak to long-term reliability or anything. Speed seems fine, but not awesome (really 7200PM is what most desktop drives were up until the "smartpower/intellipower" stuff came along, so this shouldn't surprise me). The 5yr warranty provides some comfort.

I did encounter a problem with it already though, which is somewhat concerning, but may somehow be partly the fault of my system (a relatively new Core i7 desktop from Dell). Essentially it seems to have a problem waking up from a sleep state. I'm not sure if this has to do specifically with full-system sleep, or also selective sleep of the hardware (i.e. power down hard drives after 20 minutes of inactivity). I disabled the latter and stopped using the former and so far things are fine. But the drive would basically disappear often times after waking from full system sleep and only a full reboot would restore it. This would have affected by rating more but I'm not certain yet whether it has something to do with my system.

Other than that issue it's been pretty solid, but it's a bit noisy. Certainly more so than my other drives (though not the loudest drive I've heard).

Overall it's ok, and I think it accomplishes the goal for me which was to have a large amount of storage that was at least a bit faster than a "Green" drive. But I might buy a Seagate Barracuda next time...

I have 4 of these (all separate, not RAID) in my system. What can I say, they are fantastic drives. In the 10 years that I've been building systems, and seriously using computers, I've always used WD drive, and I've never had one fail on me. They are solid as a rock. Great capacity, not super fast, but not slow either, the 64MB Cache does help. Don't waste your time with the "Green" drives, the amount of electricity a green drive saves over a black drive amounts to pennies on your electric bill, the time saved by not having to wait for your drive to realize it needs to speed up is time you can never get back. If you need solid, well performing drives, and need lots of storage, these are your drives.

When I need a large 2TB drive, this is one of my top choices. Performance is good, and I've never had a failure.

The data you put on a drive is FAR more valuable than the cost of a drive, so why buy cheap drives? I always buy higher end drives not only for their improved performance, but really, for their improved reliability.

Recently Seagate began to offer a competitive 2TB unit, I've purchased both models and so far can't say one is better than the other. Thus, buy from the manufacturer you trust most. In the past I only purchased Seagate, but they didn't have a unit to compete with this one, so I purchased a number of these and I've been impressed.

I'll continue to buy both Seagate and Western Digital while they continue to perform quickly and reliably for me.