The first 1TB or terabyte hard drives were just about ready to hit the market roughly two years ago. And in those two years since, there really hasn't been much development in the way of expanding those capacities any further. Oh sure, more manufacturers have released 1TB drives, and prices have surely fallen steadily, but there are only a handful of drives larger than 1TB. I'm not sure if we've hit a watershed as far as demand for increased capacity goes, or whether the apparent lack of progress indicates a technological hurdle when it comes to going bigger. Perhaps it's a bit of both.

But in the meanwhile, the 1TB drive has gained in popularity and continues to be refined by the major hard drive manufacturers. The 1TB makes for a nice even, round size and also gives some bragging rights when you start throwing the word terabyte around. Last year, Shawn reviewed the Western Digital 1TB GP or GreenPower, a hard drive that advertised increased power savings at the cost of a small amount of performance. Western Digital has expanded their Caviar desktop series of drives into three categories, replacing the GP model name with the Green, a Blue series for mainstream computing, and the Black series of high performance drives. Of course they still offer the Velociraptor which falls under their Enterprise line of drives along with the RE2 and RE3.


It is the WD Caviar Black 1TB drive I will be taking a look at today, thanks to the fine folks over at Geeks, who provided us with this OEM version of drive for review. The Black series, in addition to offering the greatest performance of Western Digital's consumer lineup of Caviar drives, also includes the same five year warranty as their more expensive Enterprise class. Sporting a class-standard SATA 3.0Gbps interface, 7200rpm spindle speed and a whopping 32Mb of cache, the WD1001FALS represents Western Digital's top of the line consumer grade hard drive.

Join me as I take a closer look at the WD Black 1TB drive.