Question Fast 4TB drive at WD Blue/Red price level

[Abraxip]

Hi guys

I want to buy a fast 4TB drive at about the WD REd or Blue price level. WD Blue costs 100€ for me, Red 120€ and Black 180€ which is way too expensive.

I've checked my existing 1TB and 4TB Blues using HD Tune and I've found a HD Tune benchmark for 4TB Black WD Black 4TB HD tune benchmark. My 4TB Blue has about the same numbers (Min 72, Max 161, Avg 121MB/s, Access 16ms).

Can I get faster speed than this without getting to the Red Pro price per TB? It seems from these benchmarks that most cheap WD drives are equally slow and it's more cost effective to setup RAID.

Will I get a speed increase if I get a 6TB or 8TB drive? I've read somewhere that bigger drives have bigger speeds but my older 1TB Blue actually outperformed my newer 4TB Blue on the HD Tune benchmark by 15 MB/s.

My bottleneck right now is loading whole 200-300MB files into memory. This creates a bit of a snag, specially when I need multiple files at the same time

 

[Ranulf]

You might look into Toshiba's 7200rpm drives, X300 I think is the newest model. They are usually the best price/perf around for 7200rpm, "fast" hard drives.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Nah, they're all slow compared to SSDs.

If you're just after sequential transfer rates, put two or more (identical, preferably) drives into a RAID-0. Access latency will be about the same or worse but it's certainly possible to get ~500 MB/sec sequential transfers from a large enough array of HDDs and consumer equipment / software RAID.

 

[aigomorla]

You might look into Toshiba's 7200rpm drives, X300 I think is the newest model. They are usually the best price/perf around for 7200rpm, "fast" hard drives.

they have a very high failure rate...

i would not touch a toshiba x300 drive unless it was a pure gaming drive where even then my saved games were saved on steam / origin clouds.
My advice on a drive that size with both speed and numbers for reliability stands on either HGST 7k4000, or just stomache up the extra and get a Western Digital Black.

 

[arandomguy]

HGST Desktstar NAS drives are 7200 rpm and priced to compete against WD Reds. They're more performance oriented in this segment. WD Blues (desktop class not NAS) typically will be cheaper though.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8743/hgst-deskstar-nas-4-tb-review

 

[Abraxip]

Yeah I guess I'll setup RAID, that seems to be the most speed per dollar. I checked these on userbenchmark.com and they all come in at 150MB/s or so at best, which is a too small improvement for extra money.

Thanks guys

 

[arandomguy]

Will I get a speed increase if I get a 6TB or 8TB drive? I've read somewhere that bigger drives have bigger speeds but my older 1TB Blue actually outperformed my newer 4TB Blue on the HD Tune benchmark by 15 MB/s.

What happened is WD rebranded their lineup. They eliminated the the actual WD Blue drive line but kept the naming. They eliminated the WD Green branding but kept the drive line. So your old 1 TB WD Blue is a 7200rpm more performance oriented drive. Current WD Blues are lower RPM efficiency oriented drives that used to be branded as WD Green.

https://techreport.com/news/29251/western-digital-paints-its-green-hard-drives-blue-in-rebranding

 

[Mike64]

Current WD Blues are lower RPM efficiency oriented drives that used to be branded as WD Green.

https://techreport.com/news/29251/western-digital-paints-its-green-hard-drives-blue-in-rebranding

That's overbroad, and not even what the article you linked says. Some "current WD Blue" drives are equivalent to the old Greens, others are still (more or less) equivalent to the old Blues. You have to look at the specs and/or the specific model numbers.

As your article says: "[f]or example, the 3.5", 1TB, 5,400-RPM-ish Blue drive is the WD10EZRZ, while the 1TB, 7,200-RPM drive is the WD10EZEX." Distinguishing the two gets slightly more complicated if you're looking at the retail boxes, since the only obvious "model" numbers on those packages are different than the model numbers of the actual drives they contain, but I bought a WD10EZEX in the retail box ("model WDBH2D0010HNC-NRSN") over Black Friday weekend 2018, and it's clearly labeled "7200 RPM". (Strictly speaking, the actual label on the drive says "RPM: 7200 Class", whatever that means exactly, but it's obviously not the same as the "old Greens'" "5400-RPM-ish".

 

[rchunter]

Do not use green drives if you are going to do raid 0. Pony up the extra money and buy WD black or HGST He drives.

 

[arandomguy]

That's overbroad, and not even what the article you linked says. Some "current WD Blue" drives are equivalent to the old Greens, others are still (more or less) equivalent to the old Blues. You have to look at the specs and/or the specific model numbers.

As your article says: "[f]or example, the 3.5", 1TB, 5,400-RPM-ish Blue drive is the WD10EZRZ, while the 1TB, 7,200-RPM drive is the WD10EZEX." Distinguishing the two gets slightly more complicated if you're looking at the retail boxes, since the only obvious "model" numbers on those packages are different than the model numbers of the actual drives they contain, but I bought a retail kit WD10EZEX over Black Friday weekend 2018, and it's clearly labeled "7200 RPM". (Strictly speaking, the actual label on the drive says "RPM: 7200 Class", whatever that means exactly, but it's obviously not the same as the "old Green's" "5400-RPM-ish".

I'll get a bit more specific then. The only WD Blue currently that is 7200 rpm is 1 TB as it was the "old" WD Blue that was 1 TB. They had no further development of that line of hardware after that.

Every other current WD Blue desktop hard drive, including newer high capacities, are what hardware wise was would have been the WD Green line and are 5400rpm.