[Kevin OBrien]

The 4TB WD Black is Western Digital's top-capacity and top-performing 7,200 RPM client system hard drive. The standard 3.5" form factor is designed to provide bulk storage for desktop use, while still offering top class performance. WD is using their standard five platter design for the 4TB Black (note: Caviar has been dropped from the branding) that is also highlighted by a 64MB cache, SATA 6Gb/s interface to deliver 154MB/s throughput.


WD Black 4TB Review (WD4001FAEX)

[danwat1234]

"The circuit board includes a Marvel 88i9346 controller chip with 64MB of integrated cache, as well as an additional 64MB of DDR2 RAM from the Samsung K4T51163QJ-BCE7 module."

So the controller has a total of 128MB of cache to work with?

[Kevin OBrien]

I corrected that part of the review, the SoC has some onboard memory, although the drives primary cache buffer is the 64MB module (total buffer being 64MB)

[x-cimo]

This HDD is a difficult choice, I can get it for 280$ versus 500$ for the Hitachi 7K4000, that's almost half price!

The hitachi performance are closer to match the performance of my current 2TB WD Black drive, so they might work better in my ZFS array...

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

At half the price it would be an easy choice for me. But then I'm usually limited by network or USB speeds, rather than local storage speed. Anyway, for that price difference alone you could get 1 or 2 nice SSDs and set up a speedy caching solution. If that's possible under linux (I couldn't do it, I expect).

MrS

[x-cimo]

[ETA]MrSpadge, on 27 January 2013 - 06:11 AM, said:

At half the price it would be an easy choice for me. But then I'm usually limited by network or USB speeds, rather than local storage speed. Anyway, for that price difference alone you could get 1 or 2 nice SSDs and set up a speedy caching solution. If that's possible under linux (I couldn't do it, I expect).

MrS

Thanks That's what I did. And when price for 512Gb SSD drop, I'll create a new pool and move my VMs on there:)