6 TB Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green, Seagate Enterprise

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the hard drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with an SSD for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. The hard drives were secure erased and left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor - Motherboard - Graphics - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -

Intel Core i7-4770K Asus Z97 Pro (Wi-Fi ac) (Z97 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Intel integrated 4GB Kingston DDR3-1600 Integrated on board Corsair Neutron GTX Seagate 6TB WD Red 6TB WD Green 6TB

SiSoft SANDRA 2011 Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

First we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

In this straight-line bandwidth test, the Seagate drive is the clear winner with its top-shelf average of 167MB/s for writes and 168MB/s for reads. In this test it's pretty much all about spindle speed and areal density, so the Seagate drive takes top honors thanks to its 7,200rpm motor and sky high areal density, even versus a 1TB 10K RPM WD Velociraptor drive. The WD Red and Greeen drives are both very close to one another in the mid 130MB/s ballpark, which is also very good. It puts them roughly third and fourth fastest drives we've ever tested, behind the Seagate and the 3TB Barracuda.