Conclusion
Before Western Digital launched their Red family of NAS hard disk drives, the Green family of drives served both desktop and NAS users alike. The Red family of drives is essentially Green drives with a different firmware. Other than the Red family's higher tolerance for heat and vibration, Western Digital has been trying to differentiate them through the way their firmwares are optimized.
We reviewed the 6 TB Western Digital Red (WD60EFRX) in January 2015 and now we have the 6 TB Western Digital Green (WD60EZRX) to compare it against.
Both sport Western Digital's latest high-density 1.2 TB platters, instead of the more common 1 TB platters. The result - a much higher throughput, allowing them to deliver transfer rates that were close to those of 7200 RPM hard disk drives. Of course, this doesn't help their random access performance but that's not a big issue because they both generally serve as mass-storage drives, not boot drives.
Generally, the 6 TB Western Digital Red is slightly faster, most likely due to a slightly higher spindle speed. However, we can see that the two drives are optimised quite differently.
Western Digital appeared to have optimized the 6 TB Western Digital Green drive for small sequential accesses, while the 6 TB Western Digital Red was optimized for large sequential accesses. However, the difference was small - just 4-5%. They were identical in performance as far as random accesses were concerned.
The key take we got from our tests was this - both the 6 TB Western Digital Green and the 6 TB Western Digital Red did well in what they were both designed for - sequential reads and writes. Even more importantly, their performance differences pale in comparison to their incredible storage capacity of 6 terabytes.
That is ultimately their main selling point - a humongous amount of storage capacity in a single drive. This allows users to migrate from a bunch of drives to a single drive, saving space and power consumption, with the convenience of having all of their files consolidated.
If you are currently using a few hard disk drives, we would recommend you consider upgrading to one of these large capacity drives. Not only will you benefit from the extra storage capacity, you will get a boost in how fast you can read and write your files.
For the lowest current prices on Western Digital Green hard disk drives, click here!
Support Tech ARP!
If you like our work, you can help support out work by visiting our sponsors, participate in the Tech ARP Forums, or even donate to our fund. Any help you can render is greatly appreciated!
Page |
6 TB Western Digital Green Review |
|
1 |
||
2 |
||
3 |
• Testing The 6 TB Western Digital Green |
|
4 |
• Transfer Rate Range, Platter Profile |
|
5 |
||
6 |
||
7 |
||
8 |
Support us by buying from Amazon.com! |
|
Grab a FREE 30-day trial of Amazon Prime for free shipping, instant access to 40,000 movies and TV episodes and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library! |
Questions & Comments
Please feel free to post your questions or comments here!
Date | Revision | Revision History |
09-03-2015 |
1.0 |
Comprehensive review release. |