Conclusion

Ever since Western Digital launched their 6 TB Western Digital Red (WD60EFRX) and 6 TB Western Digital Green (WD60EZRX) drives, performance enthusiasts and gamers have wondered when they were going to release the performance-oriented 6 TB Western Digital Black. Well, the 6 TB Western Digital Black (WD6001FZWX) is here, and as expected - it's freaking fast!

Okay, it's not as fast as an SSD but as far as hard disk drives go, this is a Porsche. Western Digital rates it with a maximum transfer rate of 218 MB/s. Our tests show that it has a minimum transfer rate of 110 MB/s and a maximum transfer rate of 226 MB/s.

Incidentally, those are sustained transfer rates. The real world performance of this drive is even faster, thanks to its very large 128 MB cache. This cache is not only twice the size of the cache used in performance-grade drives, it is also much faster because it uses a Samsung DDR3-1600 SDRAM chip with a transfer rate of 400 MB/s.

The 6 TB Western Digital Black also has much faster random access times, especially in comparison to the plethora of 5400 RPM drives still in use in most computers today. It cannot beat an SSD in this aspect, but it offers a tremendous amount of storage capacity that no SSD can expect to match for the next few years.

If there is a downside, that would be its power consumption and thermal output. The 6 TB Western Digital Black uses twice as much power to run as its 5400 RPM counterparts, even when it idles. That translate into a higher thermal output, which can reach almost 24°C above ambient temperature. This is a toasty drive and it should be kept well-ventilated.

The 6 TB Western Digital Black is best used as the primary drive of a performance-grade system, whether it's for gaming or for work. You can also use an SSD as a faster boot drive, in which case, the 6 TB Western Digital Black would serve very well as a fast media storage drive. Video editing work will particularly benefit from the high throughput offered by this drive.

We are very impressed with its performance, and we feel it deserves no less than our Editor's Choice Award. Congratulations, Western Digital!

For the lowest current prices on Western Digital Black hard disk drives, click here!

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