Western Digital 640 GB 3.5-Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II Bulk/OEM Hard Drive WD6401AALS (Caviar Black)

Received hard drive in a very timely matter. The packaging was horrible ... only 2 airbags, one top of the drive the other on the side of the drive. Bottom of the drive was touching the box and the drive was sliding all over banging the 3 unprotected sides. WD specifies if approved packaging is not used then it will void the warranty. I seriously doubt this is approved packaging. I did not even try to use the drive, I immediately RMA'ed it back to amazon. Drives shipped in this manor do not last long. I usually buy from the egg place but according to their reviews they also ship with poor packaging and have constant DOA drives. I posted a "customer" image of what the packaging looked like.

These drives have been tested to be the fastest 7200 RPM drives on the market. If you do a search, you'll find tests that compare the 640 black to the Raptor, and they are within 10% or less of the speed of the raptor, and on some tests, pretty much dead even.

This review compares the Raptor 150 to the 640 Black, and it compares everything--write, read, transfer, sustained transfer, small file copy, large file, etc:

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If you buy two of these drives and run them in RAID 0, you get smokin' faster transfer rates than a single Raptor.

The upside is that this drive is 80 bucks compared to a raptor at 300. Also, the largest raptor is 300GB while this one is 640GBs. So you get 1.2TBs of space for 160.00 or about half of what a single raptor costs.

Also, the Caviar Blacks are the same build quality as the Enterprise drives, so you get the 5 year warranty. The only difference in this drive and the Enterprise drives is that...Read more

This drive was highly recommended as the fastest drive available before going up to the 10krpm Velociraptor series, and after putting both in my system, I believe the claims are true.

This drive runs quietly, where I can't even hear drive accesses like I can with other drives. That's one of the most noticeable differences between this and the Velociraptor, aside from the speed, of course.

So, what is the speed difference between this Caviar Black drive and the Velociraptor? I ran HD Tune 2.55 to find out.

The test system was a brand new Core i7-920 based system using an ASUS P6T-Deluxe motherboard with on-board SATA. The 300GB Velociraptor is installed as the system drive, the 640GB Caviar Black as the data drive.

Caviar Black 640GB:
50 MB/s min, 109.4 MB/s max, 85.8 MB/s average
Access Time: 12.3ms
Burst Rate: 127 MB/s

Velociraptor 300GB:
74.6 MB/s min, 120 MB/s max, 100.9 MB/s average...Read more