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

by Josh Norem — Monday, December 29, 2014, 11:14 AM EDT

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PCMark 7 Storage Benchmarks

We really like PCMark 7's Secondary Storage benchmark module for its pseudo real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark 7 offers a trace-based measurement of system response times under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system operation. From simple application start-up performance, to data streaming from a drive in a game engine, and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel more comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of a hard drive in an end-user / consumer PC usage model, more so than a purely synthetic transfer test.

Futuremark's PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Test

Trace-Based Storage Testing

pcmark

futuremarkind

In this "real world" test we see the Seagate coming out on top, once again, for the 6TB drives, and scoring the second-highest aggregate result we've seen, beaten only by the 10krpm WD Raptor drive. It's an impressive showing for the Seagate drive, as it shows it can handle a variety of workloads, and isn't just all about capacity. The WD Red and Green drives placed slightly higher than the Seagate Barracuda 3TB from a few years ago, thanks to their areal density advantage, but in general scored about mid-pack across the board. Still, it's not a bad showing for the 6TB WD drives either, when you consider their performance versus the last generation of 3TB models.