Great HDD for 24/7 Operation!
Pros: Performance. This is the best-performing mechanical drive I have ever tested. I have four other mechanical HDDs dating back to 2005, including three other Western Digital drives, and this is the best performer across the board. It even beats my old SSD in terms of sequential writes and random writes (likely due to the on-demand nature of TRIM in the SSD): Western Digital WD1003FZEX: 1000 GB, 7200 RPM, this review 187.01 MB/s sequential read 184.54 MB/s sequential write 60.89 MB/s random read 109.23 MB/s random write Seagate ST3000DM001: 3000 GB, 7200 RPM, purchased 2012 181.42 MB/s sequential read 178.97 MB/s sequential write 50.22 MB/s random read 90.35 MB/s random write Western Digital WD20EARS: 2000 GB, 5400 RPM, purchased 2011 112.32 MB/s sequential read 107.88 MB/s sequential write 31.34 MB/s random read 56.34 MB/s random write Western Digital WD3200AAKS: 320 GB, 7200 RPM, purchased 2007 76.86 MB/s sequential read 75.57 MB/s sequential write 33.68 MB/s random read 43.90 MB/s random write Western Digital WD2500KS: 250 GB, 7200 RPM, purchased 2005 63.55 MB/s sequential read 62.52 MB/s sequential write 31.32 MB/s random read 38.16 MB/s random write Intel SSDSA2M080G2GC: 80 GB, purchased 2009 253.07 MB/s sequential read 81.98 MB/s sequential write 196.70 MB/s random read 39.61 MB/s random write Noise. This drive is very quiet. I don’t have any empirical data for noise, but the hard drive activity never became audible above the hum of the CPU fan in my desktop. Heat. This drive is very cool for such a high-performing 7200 RPM drive. Even after a 100 GB transfer that took around 20 minutes, reported temperatures never exceeded 30°C (86°F). Weight. Not that it matters much with internal drives, but this is a very light drive compared to my other 3.5 inch HDDs. The area below the platters on the bottom of the drive is recessed about 3/16 of an inch further than other drives, I assume because it uses one fewer platter. As a result, it feels much lighter. Cons: Price. A 5400 RPM Western Digital Green drive with twice the capacity is available for about the same amount of money. However, using the less-expensive green drives would incur a notable performance decrease. In my testing above, this drive had 66% better transfer rates than a 2-year-old 2TB WD Green for sequential reads and writes and 93% better transfer rates for random reads and writes. So for enterprise tasks, one could argue that the performance of this drive merits the increased cost. For most consumer uses, the 5400 RPM Western Digital Green drives are a better value because they offer at least double the capacity for the same price. The performance loss is not significant considering that they outperform 7200 RPM drives from just a few years earlier. However, for technical or enterprise purposes, the additional throughput can be a real benefit. As someone with I/O-intensive workloads (geographic information systems), this drive offers adequate capacity with exceptional performance. All performance tests were conducted using CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 with each drive loaded into the same SATA hot swap bay. Testing was conducted in Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with a socket LGA1156 Intel Lynnfield 860 CPU at 2.8 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, and the Intel P55 3 GB/s SATA controller on the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD4P motherboard. Read more
