Storage demands are not getting any lower by the day and hard drive manufacturers keep increasing the capacities to cope up with all our digital data usage such as pictures, movies and audio files. We take a look at two drives today- the Western Digital Caviar Black with 1000GB of unformatted space and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 which has the largest capacity for a single drive at the moment- 1500GB of unformatted space.As you can see, both the drives support all the standard features such as NCQ, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and Power Management. Not listed above is the amount of cache which is 32MB on both the drives. Temperatures reported by the WD are lower than the Seagateaccording to HD Tune and we saw this at both Idle and after a full run on PC Mark Vantage.

One little “ouch” is the amount of capacity that is lost after these drives are formatted. With Vista NTFS, the actual usable space of the Caviar is 931.5GB and the Barracuda is 1397.3GB. To put things in perspective, my MacBook Air drive is 80GB in size- pretty much the capacity these drives lose when formatted.