Introduction
For years the Hard Disk Drive was the mainstay of all commercial personal computers around the world. It’s had a bashing lately from the superb Solid State Drive technology, paving the future for fast, low power and robust main system storage. So where does this leave the not so humble HDD? Of late, the HDD has had a bit of a comeback, but only from a capacity point of view. HDD’s have pushed forward with a new lease of life as the ultimate back up and server or NAS storage solution.
We are at 8Tb capacities’ now, something SSD’s can only dream of, and it was a necessary step to ensure a future for HDD’s. They cannot match SSD’s for speed, power consumption and just for the fact they have a number of moving parts, they do seem to be a thing of the past, but not if you own a NAS, home server or a data centre, not that we own one of those.
Our home server articles have used Western Digital 4TB Red’s throughout, so we thought it was about time we benchmark it.
| Form Factor | 3.5 Inch internal HDD |
| Rotational Speed | IntelliPower (5400 RPM) |
| Buffer Size | 64 MB |
| NCQ | Yes |
| NASware | 3.0 |
| Transfer Rates | 6 Gb/s (Max) Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) |
| Formatted Capacity | 4,000,787 MB |
| Max sustained data rate | 150MB/s |
| Capacity | 6Tb / 5Tb / 4Tb / 3Tb / 2Tb |
| Platter capacity | 1TB |
| Target Performance MTBF | 1,000,000 hours |
| Active Power Consumption | Read/Write 250 mA Idle 230 mA Standby 7 mA Sleep 7 mA |
| Warranty | 3 Years |
We have six in total, though our results are for single disk only. For RAID results, please see our HomeServer Project.
Western Digital 4TB Red HDD Storage Review
Package - 9
Performance - 8.5
Price - 8.6
Consumer Experience - 8.5
8.7
We put this together due to the solid performance we are seeing with our HomeServer project. We had a fair idea on how this drive would perform, we tested extensively prior to deciding on the RAID configuration. We wanted to run through a dedicated review to show the average reader the performance of this HDD without the context of a Server build, so what do we think of the Western Digital 4TB Red?