Transfer Rate Range

This chart shows you the range of platter-to-buffer transfer rates from the innermost track to the outermost track. In other words, it shows you the range of disk transfer rates of the hard drives (from minimum and maximum).

It looks like the 4 TB Western Digital Red (WD40EFRX) drive has a lower spindle speed than the 3 TB Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX), which was able to deliver 6% better throughput n its outer tracks. That said, the 4 TB Red is no performance slouch.

Thanks to its higher density platters, it is actually equal in performance to the venerable 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Black (6 Gbps) hard disk drive which boasts a 7,200 RPM spindle speed. Of course, this test merely shows their sequential transfer rates and doesn't show other important attributes like random seek times.

Platter Transfer Rate Profile

When we examine the platter profile, we can see that both the 4 TB and the 3 TB Red drives have the same platter profile.

Both drives basically started at the same peak throughput of about 154 MB/s and ended at about 70 MB/s. The 4 TB Red, however, appeared to have a lower performance overall because of the higher variance in its performance.

Business Disk WinBench 99

The 4 TB Western Digital Red (WD40EFRX) did reasonably well in this test, coming in than the trio of 3 TB drives - the Western Digital Caviar Green AFT (6 Gbps), the Western Digital AV-GP AFT and the Western Digital Red. You will see why when we look at the IO Meter test results. But suffice to say, the WD Red isn't optimized for random accesses.

High-End Disk WinBench 99

The 4 TB Western Digital Red (WD40EFRX) did better in the High-End Disk WinMark 99 test, coming in between the 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Black (6 Gbps) and the 3 TB Western Digital Red.

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