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MacintoshMaster

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 16, 2010
259
1
Britain
For SATA 1? Would a standard Western Digital be just as fast? Won't a Western Digital Caviar Black be any faster than a standard Western Digital on SATA 1 (1.5gb/s)? I am very confused!
 
If you are looking at a Caviar Green as a normal drive, it isn't even close. The Black will be much, much faster. A Blue won't be as big a gap, but the Black should still be your drive of choice if you want speed. The difference is apparent even when dealing with Firewire, with even SATA 1 the performance gap will be huge.
 
For SATA 1? Would a standard Western Digital be just as fast? Won't a Western Digital Caviar Black be any faster than a standard Western Digital on SATA 1 (1.5gb/s)? I am very confused!

agree to what angryredtictac said
and make it a bit easier to understand


a 250 GB caviar green is just about as fast as a 1 tb caviar blue , a 1 tb caviar blue is roughly about as fast as a 2 tb caviar black

the caviar green is the energy efficient and most quiet one , the caviar black is the fastest but not really quiet in comparison with the green and not designed for efficiency , the blue is the ideal balance between the two. Same goes for the price Green < Blue < Black

the greens make ideal storage drives , the black are for people who absolute need the top speed and cant do with less but are just penny pinching instead of investing in velociraptor 600 gb or a SSD , the average user will be happy choosing a blue
 
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So let me get this right. Even a caviar black won't take full advantage of sata 1? So whats the point of SATA 2 if they don't make hard drives that fast? Are bigger drives slower!? I never knew this! So would a 500GB caviar black be faster than a 500GB caviar black?
 
A black will be faster because it has much faster seek times than the blue or green. Green are not at all intended to be boot drives and blue are in the middle consumer geared. Regardless of max HD speed the black will boot, launch apps, save files and access virtual memory noticeably faster than the blue or green dives. I have a 1 TB black and 2 TB green in my storage arsenal so I speak from experience.

Just a side note.. you may want to learn more of the basics of computing before going all cash crazy buying upgrades you won't really benefit from because you don't even understand how the hardware functions.
 
A black will be faster because it has much faster seek times than the blue or green. Green are not at all intended to be boot drives and blue are in the middle consumer geared. Regardless of max HD speed the black will boot, launch apps, save files and access virtual memory noticeably faster than the blue or green dives. I have a 1 TB black and 2 TB green in my storage arsenal so I speak from experience.

Just a side note.. you may want to learn more of the basics of computing before going all cash crazy buying upgrades you won't really benefit from because you don't even understand how the hardware functions.

Thanks for your helpful post. What I am doing is having the black as my boot drive and a second standard western digital as a drive to record audio to. I am bit confused on how you mean here:


"Just a side note.. you may want to learn more of the basics of computing before going all cash crazy buying upgrades you won't really benefit from because you don't even understand how the hardware functions."



Thanks!
 
Thankyou very much.

So could you confirm that a 500gb western digital caviar black is faster than a 1tb western digital black? If so, how much faster?
 
Simply google "fastest caviar black drive" and your answer is there.

MacintoshMaster.. I am being 100% serious and not mean here.. you need to build a level of self reliance. For your own good please do that.

I have no problem at all helping you with specific and/or odd issues but when it comes to basic little things and you go to the trouble of making a thread about it you are asking people to spoon feed you things. Again.. not being mean in any way here.
 
Simply google "fastest caviar black drive" and your answer is there.

MacintoshMaster.. I am being 100% serious and not mean here.. you need to build a level of self reliance. For your own good please do that.

I have no problem at all helping you with specific and/or odd issues but when it comes to basic little things and you go to the trouble of making a thread about it you are asking people to spoon feed you things. Again.. not being mean in any way here.


Hi Zen,
Before I make a post I do try my best to use google but I struggle to find much info such as "Is the 500GB faster than 1tb?"

Sometimes I just get confused!
 
The 640GB is a tad faster than the others but not so much thats it's worth buying if you want a bigger one. Maybe 2-3MB/sec faster on average tops. I considered the 640GB at one point but went with the 1TB.
 
hmm, 640, thats on 2 platters.. the 1tb is on 3, and the 320 well obviously on a single platter...

its all a tradeoff vs speed and storage..

single platter... for a boot drive.. or SSD :)

Heh its actually 334 gb on a platter for WD drives
 
A black will be faster because it has much faster seek times than the blue or green. Green are not at all intended to be boot drives and blue are in the middle consumer geared. Regardless of max HD speed the black will boot, launch apps, save files and access virtual memory noticeably faster than the blue or green dives. I have a 1 TB black and 2 TB green in my storage arsenal so I speak from experience.

Just a side note.. you may want to learn more of the basics of computing before going all cash crazy buying upgrades you won't really benefit from because you don't even understand how the hardware functions.

the green and the black are basically identical at the same size only noticeable difference is the green spins only around 5200rpm most of the time to save energy while the black keeps going at full 7200 rpm both have 64mb cache

i quiet like the blue especially i got my blue 1 tb for less then half the price of a caviar black 1 tb and because it is the latest Sata III standard a 32mb cache but full 7200rpm
here a review of the blue 1 tb and comparison with the caviar black 2 tb and some others
and their conclusion is after lots of tests and comparison

The WD10EALX is a respectable 1TB drive from a performance standpoint. Although its performance is not on par with modern 2TB and 3TB drives from Western Digital and competitors, it’s not that far off.
The WD10EALX’s Achilles heel compared to the larger drives is its higher average latency, which is detrimental to its read and write performance. It also has lower platter density, which hurts its data transfer performance. The differences shown in this review would only come out in extreme usage scenarios; for everyday use, most people will not notice a difference.
Overall, the Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB (WD10EALX) is easy to recommend.


here the full review

http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_blue_1tb_review_wd10ealx

i'd say from a price and performance point of view the blue is a good offer to happily live with.

having said that i still like the 2 velociraptors 600gb which now have a place in my QS with 2.0 ghz 4778 and a sonnet raid controller in raid 1 and the results i get there hmm i'd say now the QS does not have to hide behind my G5 2.3 dual core in performance :D
 
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The blue don't have the 4ms seek time of the black though and trust me when I say there are many more differences than rpm speed between the green and black. They have different pcb boards and use much different platters and needles.

Also.. the green spin at 5900rpm and not 5200 as you mention.

WD lays out the products as simple as can be for bare drives. The blue drives are middle of the road performers for average consumers where as the green are geared towards mass data storage. The black are a good deal faster than both in any situation.
 
The blue don't have the 4ms seek time of the black though and trust me when I say there are many more differences than rpm speed between the green and black. They have different pcb boards and use much different platters and needles.

Also.. the green spin at 5900rpm and not 5200 as you mention.

WD lays out the products as simple as can be for bare drives. The blue drives are middle of the road performers for average consumers where as the green are geared towards mass data storage. The black are a good deal faster than both in any situation.

sorry about the green , i got one but never bothered to measure its speed as i use it just as a backup drive , so it would not even bother me if would be running at only 4200rpm , i used the 5200figure as its mentioned on most tests websites

but i cant in daily usage notice any difference between the caviar blue and black both used for booting in my MDD 1.42 ghz ok i only use the mdd for the basics and only sometimes and never really have a stopwatch to hand
 
Hi there,
Thanks for all your help.
So would you say that there is not a noticeable speed difference between the 500GB WD black and the 1tb WD black? (I'm going to order soon!)
 
you have to be more specific. the marketing terms "black" and "blue" have been used for years. within a specific revision, there can be different platter/head configurations which impact disk speed, so that single-platter drives have higher densities while bigger drives with more platters actually have less density (e.g. a 640GB drive with one platter vs. a 1TB drive with 2x500GB platters). Those differences are somewhat marginal, however. The biggest difference would come from different firmwares which handle queueing and cache management.
 
Both my 1TB black and 2TB green are the newest sata3 revisions and both have 64MB cache. It's perfectly fair to say there is a massive difference between the 2 in performance.

Even if the green was running at 7200rpm it still wouldn't match the black as it doesn't have the same performance optimized hardware.
 
Thankyou for your replies. So I take it the platers are the "Disks" inside the hard drive? And less platers is good? How would I ever find this information about the hard drive?



There is this one:


http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/20122...tml?_$ja=tsid:11518|cat:20122322|prd:20122322



Or this one:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Western-D...dDrives_RL&hash=item23149bfef0#ht_4032wt_1156




I'm mainly looking for pure speed. Which would be faster. I can't find out how many platters they have. How would I find out?
 
Both my 1TB black and 2TB green are the newest sata3 revisions and both have 64MB cache. It's perfectly fair to say there is a massive difference between the 2 in performance.

Even if the green was running at 7200rpm it still wouldn't match the black as it doesn't have the same performance optimized hardware.

i never said they have the same performance , i agreed the green makes a perfect storage drive
 
I'm mainly looking for pure speed. Which would be faster. I can't find out how many platters they have. How would I find out?

You have already been told which one is the fastest. The 640GB. The difference in speed between ANY of the sizes will be so minimal that you wouldn't even notice as I already explained. Get the size you want. Period. Get it?

You ask questions.. you get answers.. then you keep asking the same question that has already been answered. Is this on purpose? I don't get it.
 
You have already been told which one is the fastest. The 640GB. The difference in speed between ANY of the sizes will be so minimal that you wouldn't even notice as I already explained. Get the size you want. Period. Get it?

You ask questions.. you get answers.. then you keep asking the same question that has already been answered. Is this on purpose? I don't get it.

Not on purpose. Just need to confirm.
Thanks anyway!





Yes

----------

You have already been told which one is the fastest. The 640GB. The difference in speed between ANY of the sizes will be so minimal that you wouldn't even notice as I already explained. Get the size you want. Period. Get it?

You ask questions.. you get answers.. then you keep asking the same question that has already been answered. Is this on purpose? I don't get it.

And one other thing.
Could you help me out here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1261830/
 
Thankyou for your replies. So I take it the platers are the "Disks" inside the hard drive? And less platers is good? How would I ever find this information about the hard drive?



There is this one:


http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/20122...tml?_$ja=tsid:11518|cat:20122322|prd:20122322



Or this one:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Western-D...dDrives_RL&hash=item23149bfef0#ht_4032wt_1156




I'm mainly looking for pure speed. Which would be faster. I can't find out how many platters they have. How would I find out?


the later at ebay is the faster one as its the newer one with 64mb cache the other has 32mb cache and is the older type





you dont want me to explain now the relation between platters and speed , as thats a bit complicated , as there are more factors then just the amount of platters , like the size of the platters , the density of the data on the platters,the chipsets used ..... and then you can get better results in a raid setup

just read the tests and benchmark results available for the drives you are interested in


the greatest speed today you get out of this little beast here i suppose, makes a normal SSD look like a datasette
http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-z-drive-r2-p88-pci-express-ssd.html...tiny drawback it cost over £3000 and not OSX compatible


but back to Harddrives ,here is a list of the best SSD's and Hdd's for your money today and raid setups explained too as raid setups are a great option to increase performance
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssd-hdd-august-2011/


as the ideal is a combination of both a SSD for the OS and App's and a fast HDD for storage ..if money is no object that is ok i am old fashioned and dont trust SSD's to last as long as my velociraptors
 
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the later at ebay is the faster one as its the newer one with 64mb cache the other has 32mb cache and is the older type





you dont want me to explain now the relation between platters and speed , as thats a bit complicated , as there are more factors then just the amount of platters , like the size of the platters , the density of the data on the platters,the chipsets used ..... and then you can get better results in a raid setup

just read the tests and benchmark results available for the drives you are interested in


the greatest speed today you get out of this little beast here i suppose, makes a normal SSD look like a datasette
http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-z-drive-r2-p88-pci-express-ssd.html...tiny drawback it cost over £3000 and not OSX compatible


but back to Harddrives ,here is a list of the best SSD's and Hdd's for your money today and raid setups explained too as raid setups are a great option to increase performance
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssd-hdd-august-2011/


as the ideal is a combination of both a SSD for the OS and App's and a fast HDD for storage ..if money is no object that is ok i am old fashioned and dont trust SSD's to last as long as my velociraptors


Thankyou very much for the links!!!!!!

I've tried to do research on raid but all seems complicated!!! I think it makes 1 OS work on 2 hard drives? Come someone explain in a simple way for me!?
 
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