|
Western Digital Launches Caviar Black - Three Flavors of Caviar
The Improvements
Five-year warranty: handy if it dies... No one likes to think of it as plausibility, but hard drives do fail, unexpectedly and sometimes tragically. It's nice to know that you can, at the very least, get a new drive to replace the old one.  Increased cache size: up from 16 to 32MB cache. I asked Ted specifically about the value the increased cache brings; he capitulated that it probably makes less difference than with the move from 8 to 16MB, which itself was less of a boost than when hard drives went from 4 to 8, and 2 to 4--but, there is a particular area where it becomes tangible, and that's with Native Command Queuing turned off, a feature that does still negatively impact single-threaded applications. StableTrac: because Motor Anchors is way too self-explanatory. (MotoAnchor is equally cool-sounding, but it hardly makes for good marketing.) Really, that's all it is; special anchors at the top and bottom of the hard drive motor in place to reduce spindle vibration. Back in the day, when the areal density of platters was less, the wobbling of the spindle, motors, and platters was unimportant. The width of the data tracks being what they were, the wobbles didn't often or completely sidetrack the heads, but with these small tracks, any miniscule vibrations can cause the head to miss, adding delays to reads and writes. Ted mentioned that these motors cost in the neighborhood of three to four times that of others, but are completely necessary to maintain the kinds of performance the drives are capable of in any, not just ideal, situations.  IntelliSeek: not totally new, but now standard in Caviars of all shades, this feature speeds up and slows down the arms of the hard drive so that they make less noise and don't ricochet off the insides of the disk. This one could have been marketing, but nope, silence enthusiasts have come to know that it really does quiet the drive without notably affecting performance. No Touch: once monikered SecurePark, this technology is only currently used by Western Digital and Hitachi. Most hard drives park the heads at the innermost ring of the disk, which is "textured" to keep the heads from sticking to the surface of the platters. And by "textured," I mean spiked--in order to prevent physical bonding of the metal heads to the metal disks, the inner ring is all jaggies, which may lead to damaged heads and definitely bodes poorly for wear. No Touch parking is done off the platter, on a plastic latch that prevents metal-on-metal contact. While the actual damage done to the heads may be irrelevant, all it takes is one head crash to make you want the extra ounce of prevention. This technology is shared with many Seagate and Samsung drives.  Tuned Aerodynamics? Finally, and probably the most clever, is the Tuned Aerodynamics. While in operation, the heads of a hard drive never actually touch the hard drive--to do so would be disastrous--they're held up, slightly, and the air inside the disk flows around it. But again, high areal density provides another hurdle, because now even the turbulence in the tiny, encapsulated atmosphere can disrupt the heads. The Aerodynamics Tuning is misleading: there's just less air. Western Digital's new drives include spacers that both reduce the volume of air inside the chassis as well as control the air over the platters, improving overall laminar flow. 
Page 1: Black is the New Black
Page 2: The Improvements Page 3: Chatting with Western Digital's Ted Deffenbaugh 
Related Reviews Internal Hard Drives December 4, 2008
Internal Hard Drives March 27, 2008
Internal Hard Drives September 26, 2006
Add Comment
0 User Comments Add Comment To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields. |
Recent Articles Editorials August 27, 2009
Editorials August 18, 2009
Editorials March 3, 2009
Editorials February 12, 2009
Recent News VICE Nov. 20, 2009 - 7:17 pm
Wired Nov. 20, 2009 - 7:07 pm
Engadget Nov. 20, 2009 - 6:58 pm
Telegraph.co.uk Nov. 20, 2009 - 6:48 pm
BBC Nov. 20, 2009 - 6:38 pm
Destructoid Nov. 18, 2009 - 11:55 pm
Wired Nov. 16, 2009 - 11:56 pm
Ultimate Typing Championship Nov. 16, 2009 - 11:42 pm
|
|||||||||||||||
