6 TB Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green, Seagate Enterprise
HD Tune Benchmarks
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In our HDTune tests we see a similar pattern from the other tests, which is that Seagate's 7,200rpm spindle speed allows it to outperform the other 6TB drives, plain and simple. Like the old saying goes, "There is no replacement for displacement." The Seagate drive's average read/write average speed of 164MB/s is the fastest we've ever seen from a drive with rotating platters, even besting the former champ, WD's 10krpm Velociraptor by a hair. The fact that the Seagate drive is faster despite its slower rotational speed shows you just how much of an advantage areal density can be. To wit, the Raptor packs just 333GB onto each platter, compared with 1TB on the Seagate, so it has a massive advantage.
The WD Red drive puts up a respectable showing hovering in the 135MB/s range, while the WD Green drive brings up the rear in the write department with a rather modest 119MB/s average. Its score of 132.9MB/s read speeds is decent but nothing to write home about.
When it comes to access time, it's all about the spindle speed so naturally we see the Seagate come out on top, bested only by the 10k Raptor. The WD drives did not fare as well in this test, which is no surprise as their "Intellipower" spindle speed is basically equivalent to 5,400 RPM, generally speaking.
In the burst test, it's no surprise that the Seagate also tops the charts thanks to its hefty 128MB cache, and in the CPU utilization tests we once again noted the Seagate's dominance. The WD Red drive surprised us with its higher CPU utilization, which was followed closely by the WD Green.
