USING THE DRIVE WITH A WINDOWS HOME SERVER
I wanted to see if this new drive would work in my Windows Home Server. So I popped the drive in and added it to the storage pool without any problems.
The only thing that was frustrating, and I say this every single time, was the amount of available space. It is a 2TB drive, but I could only use 1.82TB!
PERFORMANCE
I wanted to test the performance of the drive so I fired up HD Tune PRO and performed some tests – see the results for yourself below. Expect to see different results depending on your own specific setup.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I’ve been using this drive now for a few weeks and I love it. If you want a high capacity drive, and you want something with that oomph, then look no further than the WD Caviar Black drive.
My only grumble is the price – £300 for a 2TB drive is a little expensive, although expect the price to drop when others release similar speed and size drives.
In the UK the drive retails for around £300 and in the US for $300, although as usual you can probably find a deal or two on the Internet. And again, here in the UK we are paying quite a premium.
HI Andrew,
I love my WD Black drives. I don
Thanks fasthair
Yeah, I pulled the 2TB green drive I had in my main PC and swapped it for the black 🙂
Andrew
I respectfully disagree with slower green drives in a WHS where you plan on streaming media. If you are going to spend the extra money on gigabit networks and increased RAM then why get a lower speed drive?
Green drives for data only? Sure.
My two 500GB Caviar Blacks in Ceton get a rating of 5.9 which is the highest I have got with HDDs but are still the slowest part of my system.
BB had a 1TB Black drive for $99 and I moved one to my new EX485. Now, I doubt I could quantify the performance increases on the WHS easily but it is worth it knowing "WD Caviar Green drives yield an average drive power savings of 4-5 watts over standard desktop drives"? 5 watts an hour, for say two drives each day, is 240 watts. I pay $.13 per kWh so it is about $.04 in Los Angeles per day. Sure the drive Blacks are more expensive but for my video streams I want the best I can afford.
Quote from:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?drive…
Timoty,
I think you will find that the slowest part of the WHS network is the LAN. Even with gigabyte networks Green drives can supply more data then the LAN can deal with. I steam HDTV 1080p recordings all the time from my WHS with no problems in stuttering from Green drives.
I agree on the power savings thing…meh… But the Green drives can be as much as 20$USD less then the Black drives.
Yah I picked up on of those drives from BB yesterday for 99 too.
fasthair
Thanks Tim 🙂
Andrew
I am just saying that why spend all of this money on goodies and stop with drive speed. I was not implying my drive was the bottle neck in my setup. One gigabit network vs. 3 or 6 gigabit SATA, theoretical of course.
I mean at this point we can then bring the HP MSS processor speed into the equation.
Maybe we need a chart or graph or a PowerPoint on this? Uh, then again not.
And then of course is the Crown Royal – MGD factor…or Kona Brewery blend for this week