WD10EALS

I decided to write a quick review of the new Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB WD10EALS drive because there are none currently that I came across.  I purchased it on Newegg a few days ago and it had the lowest dollar/GB out of any terabyte drives.   For $75, it was $5 cheaper than a Caviar Green 1TB, and $25 less than a Caviar Black 1TB.

It is a 1TB 7200 rpm drive with 32MB cache from the Caviar Blue family.  This is the first 1TB Blue, so I expected it to have the latest technology and be fairly fast.  These come with a 3 year warranty.  Not as long as the 5 year warranty Caviar Black's come with, but 3 years is still a long time (And the drives are a fair bit cheaper vs. the Caviar Blacks).  I tested the drive in a LaCie external enclosure connected via eSATA.

At a max read speed of 140 MB/s and average of 111 MB/s it is very fast.  The drive is actually faster than a Caviar Black WD1001FALS and RE3 500GB WD5002ABYS.


Here is a shot of the HDTune read test for the WD10EALS connected via eSATA:

And the Western Digital Caviar Black 1001FALS for comparison connected via SATA:

Also, a Western Digital RE3 500GB WD5002ABYS drive for comparison connected via SATA: