I recently bought two Caviar Blacks (2002FAEX and 4001FAEX) and both are so noisy that I want to throw them out the window. However, I contacted WD technical support and they said that the noise is completely normal. I also bought a Caviar Blue (10EZEX) and it’s as quiet as a mouse, and that has left me wondering why Western Digital can’t extend their Caviar Blue lineup into the 2-4TB range so people can have fast, high-capacity 7200rpm hard drives that don’t make lots of noise during seek.
I know many people have blamed the lack of Automatic Acoustic Management for the excessive noise levels generated by the Caviar Black drives, but the latest generation of Caviar Blues is completely silent despite the fact that Automatic Acoustic Management has been disabled. Hence, I cannot understand why we are forced to put up with the racket generated by the Caviar Blacks just to get a fully-fledged 7200rpm hard drive in the 2-4TB range.
My own testing has confirmed that the latest generation of Caviar Blues outperforms the latest generation of Caviar Blacks in terms of sequential read speeds by an average of 24-36MB/s, with only a small increase in access times, and for this reason alone, I’d like to see it released in higher capacities. I know this arrangement doesn’t suit everyone, but for someone like me who wants to get as much capacity and performance as possible from their hard drives without paying for it in terms of decibels, I think it would be well worth it. Otherwise, I’ll probably have to take my business elsewhere and buy my hard drives from a company that cares about noise, speed AND capacity.
