Conventional wisdom says solid state drives (SSDs) beat traditional hard drives silly in any performance metric you care to mention. How can the likes of Western Digital's latest magnetic spinner, the Caviar Black 1TB WD1002FAEX, therefore hope to compete?

Lots of performance-enhancing features; Good balance between capacity and performance

Still much slower than an SSD; SATA 6Gbps interface is redundant

It happens to all of us at some point. We constantly run short of hard drive space, no matter how incredibly cavernous you thought your current drive was when you bought it. Did you really expect Dragon Age: Origins and Borderlands to soak up almost thirty gigabytes between them? Didn't think so.

I had this drive about three weeks on a brand new system..I just got done loading two weeks of OS and other programs and getting it the way I wanted..I just moved today 300 gigs of data off five hard drives 5-7 years old and did a virus scan and noticed system frozeI rebooted and cant see drive on...

NONE I SEE

DIED IN THREE WEEKS

WD's Caviar Black series SATA II hard drives feature a faster spindle speed and 32MB of onboard cache. Drive capacities range from 500GB through to 1.0TB, but all the Caviar Black series drives use Perpendicular Magnetic Recording.

Review The 2TB Caviar Black is the second hard drive we have seen with a capacity of two terabytes. Glance back to our 2008 round-up of 1TB drives , which used three or four platters, and you can see that this is pretty much a doubling of areal density.

The new 7,200 rpm 2 TB drives from Western Digital, RE4 and Caviar Black, achieved the same performance level. They are a lot faster than the 2 TB "green" models, making them to be the right choice if you are looking for a 2 TB drive.

Earlier this week, Western Digital announced two new additions to their 2 TB product lines.  These new models nudge up the capacity of their Caviar Black and RE (not REx-GP) lines, bringing 2 TB capacities to every series except for their Blue line.

Caviar Black drives are Western Digital's flagship models, and the list of features doesn't disappoint. Every drive boasts 32MB of cache, and this is joined by features to prevent platters wearing out and knocks damaging the disk.

Benchmarking the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB has really opened my eyes to what kind of speed the latest generation of hard disk drives are capable of. As I mentioned during testing, I can remember when striping two IDE drives in a RAID0 array was the only way to see that kind of performance...

The cost of hard drive storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, while the capacity getting larger and larger. A year ago, 1TB drives were several hundred dollars. Now, they're only a few tens of dollars more than their 750 GB and 500 GB brethren.

Speedy; Inexpensive

Performance could be just a little better