About 5 years ago, I posted a picture of a two 1TB HDDs and people asked me what I plan to do with such a large amount of space. But years after, filling up 2TB of HDDs is but a cakewalk. If you’re an avid gamer, filling an HDD with Steam games is the way to go. But is it always just about space? Can’t we have a bit more performance chucked into the bucket? WD’s latest Black HDD is just that. With a whopping 6TB, you can’t help but dream about the amount of things that you can store. Is it fast? Let’s find out.
Looks
Typical 3.5” HDD. Nothing much to ogle at. It has the standard SATA power and SATA ports.
Performance
| Bench Buddy | |
| CPU | Intel Core i5-4670K |
| VGA | ASUS GTX980 Matrix |
| Memory | 16GB |
| HDD | WD Black 6TB |
| Motherboard | ROG Maximus VII Gene |
For our benchmarks, we used three programs. We removed Anvil due to its nature being an SSD tester.
Crystal DiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software.It measure sequential reads/writes speed,measure random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed,select test data (Random, 0Fill, 1Fill),provide theme support and Multi-Language support.
Now this is where it gets interesting. For 512K and 4K, the HDD exhibits a faster write speed than read! These two categories are more random-based as compared with the sequential test and it shows just how the HDD fares in picking up small bits and pieces of data.
Definitely not in the league of HDD’s, the WD Black when compared to its NAS sibling, Red, the difference is pretty evident. Again, both devices are for different applications.
HD Tune Pro
HD Tune Pro is a hard disk / SSD utility with many functions. It can be used to measure the drive’s performance, scan for errors, check the health status (S.M.A.R.T.), securely erase all data and much more.
Write
Read
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WD Black 6TB |
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| MB/s | Min | Ave | Max |
| Write | 104.5 | 288.9 | 175.7 |
| Read | 105.3 | 225.3 | 177.6 |
The speed for both Write and Read goes downhill as it fills up.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes.
Conclusion
Well, there’s no doubt about it. The WD Black 6TB HDD is large AND freakin’ fast for a physical drive. Not that it can beat SSDs in terms of performance, but if consumer disk-based storage is concerned, then this is probably the best HDD around.
It is definitely a performance HDD and is a must for those into large file creation and video games. The 6TB is one hefty boot to fill and it might take a year or two for it to spill. Or I might just be underestimating your powers.
For that power, you need to shell out about PhP 13,900 for the 5TB version and PhP 16,000. WD guarantees a 5-year warranty for this bad boy.
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