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.

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

When Seagate sent over their new SATA 6 Gb/s Barracuda XT 2TB hard drive we were caught off guard. At the time I was neck deep in enterprise products and working with LSI on their new RAID controllers.

A few months back, Futurelooks took a close look at one of the first 2TB drives to hit the market, the Western Digital's Caviar Green 2.0TB SATA2 Hard Drive . A couple of the features that the drive boasted was its massive 2.0 TeraByte capacity while still enjoying respectable low level power...

When I first started this assignment, I really was not prepared for the sheer amount of time and effort involved in properly testing storage. In the past, I had pretty much taken hard drives and their technology for granted. It sure seems simple enough until you start looking for the differences!

WD1001FALS 5 years While Solid State Drives are sexy, new and considered "high performance", the truth of the matter is they are also bleeding edge technology and in some cases may in fact be slower than the more mundane alternative.

Does Western Digital's latest Caviar Black 1TB stand out from the pack as conspicuously as the venerable 640GB drives that it effectively replaces? Not quite, at least based on the results we've seen today. But then the Black did have quite a lot to live up to.

If you need 2TB of storage but don't want to sacrifice performance, Western Digital's Caviar Black (WD2001FASS) might be for you. This SATA II 3.5in internal hard drive lacks the power-saving features of the company's GreenPower drives but provides a faster spin speed and better overall performance.

If you're looking for a combination of speed and capacity in a single internal hard drive, the Western Digital WD1001FALS 1TB Hard Drive ($190 street), better known as the Caviar Black, is hard to beat.

Impressive areal density; Excellent single drive performance.

Ill-suited for RAID 0

JR.com has the best price on the 2tb caviar black edition drive. It was advertised as 32mb cache model WD20000LSRTL. I googled that and found nothing. So I crossed my fingers hoping that they would ship me the 64mb cache version, and to my suprise, they did!

Durable; Fast Connectivity; Quiet; Reliable; Versatile