According to Western Digital's own publicity, the Cavier Black is *the* high-performance hard drive in its range.  It's aimed at very powerful PCs and those who want to play the most demanding games.

These drives don't suffer from overheating, use head-isolating technology and are vibration-resistant, which combine to make them both reliable and fast.  They ship with a five-year limited guarantee.

Good Speeds
The Caviar Black is just behind the leaders in the field.  Reading data, it reached an average of 84 MB/s, compared to 94 MB/s for the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB.  Likewise, while writing data, it averaged speeds of 72 MB/s, while the Seagate was at 81 MB/s in the same conditions.  However, for copying files, Western Digital pulled ahead, with its main competitor an average of 5 MB/s behind.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB   Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB
Write speed (MB/s)   Read Speed (MB/s) Local Copy (MB/s) Distant Copy (MB/s)

Lower Noise Levels
This is an internal hard drive with excellent speeds, but that leads to an increase in in noise levels when the disk is in active use.  You can, though, help matters, by turning on AAM, and the speeds don't fall much in this mode.  On average, we achieved between 83 MB/s for reading data and 70 MB/s for writing data in this mode.  The access time increases from 13 ms to 22 ms.

A Boost for Launching Apps
We mentioned earlier that this drive was a little slower than Seagate's Barracuda.  All of that changes when it comes to launching applications, where Western Digital takes the lead thanks to its speedier access times.  The Caviar Black is more prone to get hot, with an average temparture of 48° after a solid hour's work.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1 To   Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB
Crysis (s) Winrar (s) Open office (s) Photoshop (s) Access time (ms) Boot to Windows (s) Temperature (°C)