Western Digital 4TB Red HDD Storage Review

Ok, so we are only testing one, but you cannot beat a picture of six of them together, they are like steel bricks compared to the SSD’s on the market.

Test Set Up

All synthetic tests are carried out three times with the best result taken. We used the various software’s own test count settings, so for example CrystalMarkx64 we ran the test count at nine, but repeated this three times.

• Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
• Processor: Intel i7-5820K
• Motherboard: Asus Rampage V Extreme
• Graphics: MSI GTX 970 GAMING Twin Frozr V
• Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666Mhz
• Drives: Crucial BX100 500Gb SSD (OS)
• Cooler: Scythe Mugen MAX CPU Cooler
• PSU: Corsair HX1000i

Synthetic Tests

• IOMeter
• CrystalMarkx64

We are used to testing SSD’s on Hardwareslave, and we have tested HDD’s for many years in all configurations. They are the “go to” drive for storage, and if you are still using them for your OS drive, it’s time to change! We are only going to run through a couple of tests, we have dropped the ADIA64 and PCMark tests for this one. We have a number of RAID benchmarks on the following articles,

• Home Server Build Part 1 – Requirements, Chassis and PSU
• Home Server Build Part 2 – Core Components and Build
• Home Server Build Part 3 – The Context
• Home Server Build Part 4 – Optimisations

For example, below is a 4000Mb test with hardware and software RAID, including a single disk test. We ran through a number of tests before deciding on the RAID set up for out Server, all using the Western Digital 4TB Red drive.

Part 5 coming soon including a chassis upgrade, Windows 10 64bit installation, a disk configuration change and network back ups.