Western Digital Black Drives

Western Digital divides their internal hard disk drives for desktop computers into three distinct families - the WD Blue for their mainstream drives, the WD Green for their quieter, cooler drives and the WD Black for their high-performance drives.

The WD Black family of high-performance drives are designed for power users and gamers using desktop PCs. Creative professionals can rely on it for a combination of industry-leading performance and storage capacity. Gamers will enjoy how fast their game library loads, and the number of games they can store.

Best of all, all WD Black drives have to pass more strenuous and aggressive tests over a longer period of time than the standard hard disk drive is subjected to. That's why they are backed up by a 5-year warranty.

Western Digital Black models support the following features :

Increased Reliability - The WD Black drive is equipped with StableTrac Technology (2 TB and larger models) by securing the motor shaft inside to increase reliability and help reduce impact due to system-induced vibrations from other components. By stabilizing the platters inside, the WD Black drive results in more accurate tracking in a particular sector during read and write operations, optimizing performance and reliability.

Increased DRAM Cache - The WD Black drive delivers high-speed transfer speeds and read rates of your files with impressive cache sizes of up to 128 MB of DRAM on their high capacity models. WD’s Dynamic Cache Technology improves caching algorithms in real time to allocate and optimize cache between reads and writes. This movement of cache for read data helps to reduce congestion and increase overall performance.

Efficient Dual Processing - When it comes to processing power, more is always better especially for loading games or large multimedia files. The WD Black drive features a dual-core processor that offers twice the processing capability as a single-core processor to maximize drive performance for faster read and write speeds.

Industry-leading 5-year limited warranty - Compared to standard hard drives such as WD Blue™, their WD Black hard drives pass more strenuous and aggressive internal testing over a longer period of time, which is why the WD Black drive is backed by an industry-leading 5-year warranty.

Today, we will look at the Western Digital Black (WD6001FZWX) 6 TB hard disk drive. It is currently the largest capacity drive of the WD Black family :

Although Western Digital already had 6 TB hard disk drives for some time, namely the 6 TB Western Digital Green (WD60EZRX) and the 6 TB Western Digital Red (WD60EFRX), this is the first 6 TB hard disk drive with a spindle speed of 7200 RPM and a large 128 MB cache. Let's compare their specifications below and then find out how they compare against the new 6 TB Western Digital Black (WD6001FZWX) hard disk drive.

Specifications

Packaging

The 6 TB Western Digital Black (WD6001FZWX) drive came in a sealed anti-static plastic packet, with a sachet of dessicants inside to keep it dry. To remove it, just tear off the top or cut it open, and slide out the drive.

Be sure to ground yourself before removing and handling the hard disk drive as static can damage it. In particular, you should try to avoid touching the exposed PCB located on the lower underside of the drive.

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