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Page 1 of 2   After presenting a 2TB WD Green drive, models for the middle segment were skipped and the company went directly to the fastest models. This time, WD joy us with the representative of Black series featuring the largest capacity: whopping 2 terabytes of space. Black Series represents a step forward when the speeds of reading and writing are in question, so we expected no less from the new model, WD2001FASS.
The usage of 500 GB plates has become something common when it comes to hard drives of the capacity over 1 TB, especially when targeting high-performance, so it's no surprise that the company decided to use four plates of 500 GB for their best desktop model. We must admit we were pleasantly surprised by the fact that the price of 2 TB WD Green model went down to about 170 euros, however Black Series 2 TB model should sell for 270 euros which made us a bit sad.
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Dimensions of this model are identical to those of Green Series version, but Black differs primarily in the electronics parts. Namely, the improvement is related to two processors and 64 MB cache which takes care for high-performance of this model. Technologies such as IntelliPower and IntelliSeek for energy savings are not implemented in this model, but the WD performance is improved because of two servo motors, which allow faster positioning of the head and thus faster data access, which can be seen from from the results . We noticed that the vibration and noise are significantly reduced while drive works, thanks to StableTrac technology (motor shaft is fixed on both sides, thus reducing the vibration). However, there is another little problem: the heat. Take note that this problem is not so excessive, but additional cooling is certainly recommended, especially for long, continuous usage. The plus in this while story is that the disc comes with a five-year warranty.
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For the purposes of this testing, we built a computer based on Intel P55 chipset (ICH10R south bridge) and Windows 7 in 64-bit flavor. Tests were undertaken with both synthetic applications and by measuring the transfer in real conditions with different sized data. It's pretty interesting that ATTO Bench and HD Tune show almost equal results of reading and writing, with an average of approximately 105 MB/s and excellent access time of only 9.8 ms, which is certainly a respectable value. Working with different sized data provides copying from the fastest to the slowest partition (the beginning and end of the disc), and in this case a significant role goes to the cache size and various optimizations for certain file sizes. The latter can be seen from the results, where the average speed with medium sized files is almost twice higher than the speed with large files, thanks to internal algorithms in drive controller.
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