Western Digital Launches Caviar Black - Three Flavors of Caviar

Reviews: Storage

Author:
Editor:
Sponsor:
Published:

Max Slowik
Kurtis
N/A
Jun. 10, 2008

Specifications

<< Previous

Home >>

Chatting with Western Digital's Ted Deffenbaugh

So Western Digital has supplied us with a pair of graphs--they'll do at least until we get the drives to test for ourselves. For all their benchmarks, they have disabled Native Command Queuing. NCQ requires some effort on the part of the hard drive's hardware, and introduces latency to all its operations--with the benefits of better multi-threaded operation, something benchmarks don't depend on. The flip side to this is that it raises the importance of the hard drive's cache, thereby giving Caviars an edge.

What's interesting about Western Digital's graphs is that their Green drives' performance is consistently lower than its competitors; they're not exactly trying to hide the fact these hard drives sacrifice performance in favor of silence and power efficiency.

Overall, Western Digital wants to increase brand awareness. Blue = ~~Bor~~Reliable, Green = Eco, Black = Enthusiast. As an interesting bonus, they also want to bring attention to areal density and platter count. Suffice it to say, 334GB on three platters is better than 250GB on four, etc. And Western Digital wants to show a little platter.

After the brief, I chatted with Ted Deffenbaugh. It was informal and honest; I've sent along these questions in email form so that he can answer them at length, without me paraphrasing. We'll append this article when he replies. Just the same, here's the short version:

Of all the improvements going into these Caviars, not many of them are slated to enter the mobile (notebook) market in the short-term. The logic is simple: because they're enhancements designed to reduce vibration, they don't really make a difference with 2.5" drives. Laptop hard drives are smaller and don't have the same issues running at the same speeds. And StableTrac, specifically, will only be available, for now, with Black Caviars.

With all the talk about reducing vibrations, I asked Ted how hard drive suspension affected performance. "It's horrible!" Not only does it increase the chances that the heads sidetrack, in some cases, the drive hits a resonant frequency inside the case, causing massive and repeated failures. If you're Hell-bent on suspending the drive, at least benchmark it before and after: see for yourself.

And on a completely different subject, I brought up the 20,000 RPM hard drive rumor. I should say 'rumors,' since they're nothing new, but always seem more and more plausible. While Ted told me that he wouldn't talk about products in development, he was completely free to talk about products that don't exist. There's no way, with existing or planned technologies, that anyone will make a 20K hard drive. It's that at those speeds, it would be hard to control the vibration, even if the platters were only the one-inch variety. He mentioned trials (experiments, really) in hydrogen gas environments... it's just not on the horizon.

Right, the drives are in the mail, and we'll update our terabyte charts immediately. But even without the hardware, these beastly storage machines are worth a second glance, and we can't wait to put them through the paces and churn out some numbers.

<< Previous

Page 3 of 3

Home >>

Page 1: Black is the New Black
Page 2: The Improvements
Page 3: Chatting with Western Digital's Ted Deffenbaugh

Subscribe to Internal Hard Drives [more info]

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.