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Friday, December 14, 2012

The new Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB WD30EZRX-00DC0B0 1TB per Platter hard drive benchmarks

In the previous post, I posted some benchmark figures of the Toshiba DT01ACA300 drive which I purchased as the "everyday drive". It replaced my old RAID-0 setup, which was still faster at sequential reads but maybe not so fast for random reads and multiple queues.
 
Since I was replacing my 2TB RAID-0 array with a 3TB drive, I had to buy a 3TB drive for backup as well. Up until now, I was using the Samsung HD204UI Eco Green drive, which served me well. But like I said, it was just (really? just?) a 2TB drive and I had to buy a 3TB backup drive.
 
Samsung drives have served me well in the past - I have had 7 drives iirc (160GB, 250GB x 2, 500GB, 1TB x 3, 2TB) and only one of the 250GB drives still remain in the PC back at home. Everything else was sold when upgrading the drives. (I don't like cluttering.) But as of today, Samsung unfortunately does not exist in the hard drive market anymore. They sold their hard drive business to Seagate.
 
Currently the best drives for backup and low power applications is the Western Digital Green drive series. They come at 5400RPM rotational speed, and are quite slow compared to the 7200RPM drives...until they released the 1TB/platter drive few weeks ago. This was just great timing for me. I jumped up and grabbed one of those babies from Sofmap. I had a few points which I could use, so the total amount I had to pay for the drive was just JPY9,520. That's about $113. It's in fact cheaper than even in the USA. =]
 
Anyways, here are some benchmarks. Just for the sake of comparison, the benchmarks were done on an Intel SATA2 port of the Intel controller on my ASRock Z68 Extreme4 board. Tests were done on the empty drive in Windows 8 x64.
 
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64
 
2012-12-13_20-46-35
HD Tune Pro 5
 
2012-12-13_20-50-49
 
If you compare these figures with the ones I posted about the Toshiba drive, you'd see they are quite slow. But it doesn't matter. I value reliability, less potential wear and tear and low power consumption when it comes to a drive that would have the sole purpose of holding the backups. I would not use it for anything else.

OK, now that I have bought all the HDDs for my new HDD setup, I have to pray that they don't go kaput. That's the problem with the hard drives. They can die easily as a new born, but if they get passed that initial uncertain period, they will most probably work without any issues for a long time. In that sense, my Samsung drives were very reliable, because they had passed their uncertain period. These two drives just started their life. I will have to be watchful for the next few months. At least, now I don't have a RAID-0 array to worry about.

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