Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD1001FALS

Other products by Western Digital

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 4 x 1 inches ; 1.6 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B001C271MA
• Item model number: WD1001FALS
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (338 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 2, 2008

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

It's easy to choose the world-class quality of a Western Digital hard drive. We’ve not only designed a drive that's right for you, we've also made it simple to find. These drives are ideal for business, home use, or high performance desktops, and are available in capacities up to 2 TB. With our renowned leading-edge engineering, you'll always make the right choice with WD. And you'll never compromise on quality.

The power of choice. The quality of WD.
WD Caviar® Blue™ Performance and reliability for everyday computing. Select true blue for reliable quality in everyday use.	WD Caviar® Green™ Cool, quiet, eco-friendly. Select green for doing more with less energy consumption.	WD Caviar® Black™ Maximum performance for power computing. Select black when you demand the highest performance.

WD Caviar Black – Maximum performance for power computing.

WD Caviar Black drives combine a high performance electronics architecture with a rock solid mechanical architecture to deliver the perfect storage solution for your fully-loaded PC or maxed out gaming machine. Cool drive operation, no-touch head technology, and leading-edge vibration protection ensure enhanced reliability. And we back it all up with a 5-year limited warranty.

Features at a glance Maximum performance Ultra-cool and quiet Massive 1 TB capacity 5-years limited warranty

Power your PC with our top-of-the-line high-capacity drives.

High Performance Electronics Architecture

• Dual processor - Twice the processing power to maximize performance.


• 32 MB cache - Bigger, faster cache means faster performance.

Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture

• 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.

5 Year Limited Warranty

Massive Capacity - WD Caviar Black SATA drives are available in capacities up to 1 TB.

View StableTrac demo here.

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.

How this WD hard drive protects your data

• Data Lifeguard is an exclusive set of data protection features, including shock protection, an environmental protection system and real-time embedded error detection and repair. WD's Data Lifeguard technology automatically finds, isolates, and repairs problems that may develop over the life of a hard drive.


• Data Lifeguard Tools are software utilities designed for WD hard drives that work with the embedded Data Lifeguard features to make hard drive installation,diagnostics and repair both simple and worry-free.


• ShockGuard instantaneously protects the hard drive against damage from bumps and vibrations while it is running. This technology enables WD Caviar drives to achieve industry-leading shock specifications.

Ideal For
Power computing applications such as multimedia, video and photo editing, and maxed out gaming computers.

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

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fast drive, tons of storage, February 25, 2009

By	C. Longo (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital 750 GB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD7501AALS (Electronics)

The Caviar Black model of drives differ in three ways from Blue in three major ways:

1) 32MB buffer vs 16MB. This means the drive is overall faster because it can store more data in memory local to the drive. So if you access the same data frequently there is little or no drive access to get at the data.

2) Dual processors vs single. This will alleviate the load on your CPU as the drive itself has more processing power locally.

3) Five year warranty vs three. Five years is a lifetime in hardware. Basically, you're covered for longer than you will most likely use the drive.

The Caviar Black line comes in three four sizes; 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, and 500GB. The 1TB and 640GB are the fastest because they use a denser platter technology which allows the drive head to get at the data quicker. The 750GB and 500GB are no slouches though and the differences in speed will not be noticeable to most people under most real-world usage scenarios.

Caviar Black drives are the fastest affordable consumer drives available today. If you want faster you have to look that the VelociRaptor 10000RPM line of drives but expect to pay a lot more for a lot less storage.

I measured the speed of the 750GB model using the HD Tune utility and access time was a fast 12.5ms with less than 1% CPU usage on my 3.2Ghz Intel Quad Core setup. The drive runs cool at 32°C in my system and is quiet. Overall a great drive at a great price. You can't really go wrong.

100 of 111 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beginner's guide to adding a second hard drive, May 3, 2009

By	Sandstone (Salem, OR United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This is for people (like me) who've never done this before... I use Windows Vista and an HP desktop computer.

1. Ordered this drive, which arrived promptly. Drive was well packed with foam. As expected, it didn't come with anything else. It works fine, and to me it doesn't seem noisy.

2. Ordered Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches). Note: older computers won't support SATA. If you have a newer computer, it should work. SATA cables are red and about 1 cm wide, the older cables are about an inch wide and silvery. If your hard drive uses these, don't get this drive.

3. Ordered Tripp Lite P946-12I Serial ATA (SATA) Dual Power Adapter Cable - 4pin/2x15pin SATA - 12in. This is a "Y" adapter (optimistically planning for my next hard drive!), but a straight one would also work. I found out after it arrived I already had a SATA power adapter in my case. However, it wouldn't have reached with the available wiring length, so I still ended up using this.

4. In my case, the drive requires 4 screws to install it. These are short screws with large flat heads, the heads form a sort of "rail" for it to glide into the rack on. On opening my case, I realized that HP had thoughtfully provided extra screws for future upgrades! The drive does not come with screws.

5. Installed drive in rack, plugged in the two cables, no problem.

6. Get to Windows. Your new hardware icon should say "locating... installing" or something like that.

7. Go to Start-Computer (right click on Computer) - Manage - then to Disk Management. Find your new drive at the bottom of the screen, and click over the "drive 1" (or whatever) designation to make it "online". Then right click the long color band over the drive's partition graphic and start the "new simple volume" wizard. Stayed with the defaults.

That's about it, everything worked the first time. After the drive was up and running, I decided to error-check the drive from Windows Explorer (under the tools tab for drive). This gave the unexpected result of giving me a blank screen for several hours while it checked it. When I've error-checked drive c:\, my screen gives me information on what it's doing. This was just totally blank, which was disconcerting, but in a few hours it finished what it was doing and everything worked.

I also went into the BIOS on bootup (pressed F10 while booting, don't know if this is the same on other PC's) to see if I needed to do anything there, but I didn't. The new drive was already listed. I did get a new option on booting, to set up the drive in a RAID configuration, I left this alone. (non-RAID)


This is written to help first-timers like me. If any experienced computer folks want to comment and add pearls of wisdom feel free!

101 of 113 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 1TB of space, 32MB cache *PLUS* SATA2? Absurd. Buy now, January 20, 2009

By	Gordon Ewasiuk (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought two of these. Just an insane price. Thanks, Amazon. The drives are bulk/OEM which means they come with nothing. Just the drives and the anti-static bags. Do your homework. If you want software to hold your hand through a hard drive install, do not buy this drive. If you need screws, rails, or cables, do not buy this drive.

If you want to save some cash while getting an absolutely absurd amount of disk space with SATA2 (3Gbps) plus 32MB of cache (older drives have 4-16MB), then get these drives. They are beasts.

After the Seagate fiasco, I vowed to go with an alternative. Western Digital came through with these monster hard drives. Get one. Get two. You will not be disappointed.