IO Meter

We compared the 6 TB Western Digital Green (WD60EZRX) to the 6 TB Western Digital Red (WD60EFRX). For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

Throughput (Random Access)

The small random reads and writes are the most important tests for applications that make a lot of random accesses, so those would be key performance indicators for drives that are used as boot or system drives, but not very important for NAS or media storage drives.

The 6 TB Western Digital Green essentially performed as well as the 6 TB Western Digital Red. They are both not very suitable for use as boot or system drives. You would be better off with an SSD or a hard disk drive with a higher spindle speed like the 1 TB Western Digital VelociRaptor or the 4 TB Western Digital Re.

Random Access Time

The 6 TB Western Digital Green's slower random read and write results make it more likely that the 6 TB Western Digital Red has a higher spindle speed than a higher areal density.

CPU Utilization (Random Access)

Although we generally don't bother much about CPU utilization in the age of quad-cores, it's interesting to note that the 6 TB Green uses a lot less CPU time than the 6 TB Red for its transfers - almost half as much.

Throughput (Sequential Access)

This is the most important test for the WD Green drives because they primarily serve as secondary storage drives, so their ability to read and write files sequentially is key. The large sequential transfer performance is particularly important because they are often used to store large media files, which are all practically larger than than 512 KB these days.

The 6 TB Western Digital Green was faster than the 6 TB Western Digital Red at small sequential accesses but slower at large sequential accesses.

Sequential Access Time

CPU Utilization (Sequential Access)

Even when it comes to sequential accesses, the 6 TB Green uses a lot less CPU time than the 6 TB Red for its transfers, particularly in large reads and writes.

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