Caviar Black 1TB: Great drive. I was expecting a little more, but not because of the SATA 6Gb/sec interface. With dual actuators at play, a massive 64MB cache, 500GB platters, and the same dual core CPU of the 2TB models, this drive should have at least matched those other drives in performance. It appears Western Digital was not as aggressive with the track geometry in these drives, fitting the same amount
Marvell Controllers: The last thing a reviewer wants to see is artificial performance gains from drivers. Not only do they suck up resources unnecessarily, they risk data loss by caching data being written to the drive. It wouldn't be so bad if this was user selectable, but it's not. The only way to disable this caching is to stick with the (much) older driver. This is unacceptable. Marvell needs to leave the cache settings to the OS and stop trying to mask the fact that their controller can't burst at full SATA 6Gb/sec throughput without resorting to such trickery. We've been tooting that horn at PCPer since October of last year, and will keep doing so until Marvell stops unnecessarily sucking up system resources to do what Windows already does in the first place.
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We couldn't override their override of our override. -Ka D'Argo
WD 1TB Caviar Black SATA 6Gb/s
15th February 2010 11:49
