There are two major flavors of drives you can use to store data on your computer. SSD (solid state drives) provide speed though they have a higher cost. So they are best used to store your operating system and software. A good old fashioned hard drive is the more economically efficient way to store large amounts of data that isn’t constantly being accessed.
Today we’re going to look at Western Digital Black drives in a variety of sizes.
All of the drives spin at 7,200 RPM (revolutions per minute) and use a 6 GB/s SATA connection. There is also a cache included to help improve the speed of data that has been recently accessed. The two biggest drives have a 128MB cache and the three smaller ones have a 64MB cache. Users who have a lot of music, photos, graphics and movies (large chunks of data) will likely want a larger capacity. Other users will have all the room in the world on even the smallest drive listed.
Below are the five sizes along with the price I saw at Amazon as I was writing this post. Obviously Amazon can change the prices up or down whenever they please.
- WD Black 6TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive – 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 3.5 Inch sells for $299.50
- WD Black 5TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive – 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 3.5 Inch sells for $219.99
- WD Black 3TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive – 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch sells for $150.99
- WD Black 2TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive – 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch sells for $122.66
- WD Black 1TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive – 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch sells for $73.99
Which drive gives you the most bang for the buck? It really depends on your needs. But at the current prices, the 1GB, 3GB and 5GB drives seem like the best deals.
The main reason to buy ….the 5 year warranty .
The main reason not to buy ….they sell a Western Digital Black Enterprise Edition for your server also with a five year warranty …. more money but with the faith that maybe it will be even more reliable which is more important than just the warranty.
After all you should not be putting these in workstations , that is for SSD’s , large storage is for network storage devices. The Blacks that could be for offline backup devices.
Ken, every user has a different budget and different needs. These may not be the right drives for YOU. They are a good choice for many users.
I neglected to mention, if you everr have a drive fail make sure you send in the old one or the new one will only be granted a 3 month warranty instead of the balance of the 5 years remaining in addition to the expectation that you get billed on your credit card for the replacement if the old one doesn’t go back.
Also track the date of the original warranty and make sure you are set for the balance by checking your serial number of replacement on line after you get the new one.
Thanks for confirming what I thought. I just bought a 4 TB WD Black drive from another retailer on a one day sale at $179.99. As you state, it provides the best balance of size, price, performance and warranty for me and my budget. Considering that this was not a planned purchase, I have to compromise a little or I would have gone larger and had room for future expansion, but this will do. My existing data drive has become problematic so it is being replaced before all I have left is my backup. That was a lesser quality drive bought with size outweighing price. I learned my lesson. Data worth saving is worth a top notch drive. Thanks for the informative article.