Testing The 4 TB Western Digital Red

The Testbed

Testing Methodology

We tested in both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, with the latest updates. We chose to use IO Meter 2008 as well as our "old faithful", WinBench 99 2.0, with the following tests :

• Platter Data Transfer Profile
• Business Disk WinMark 99
• High-End Disk WinMark 99
• Disk Transfer Rate (Beginning)
• Disk Transfer Rate (End)

Business Disk WinMark 99 is a real-world simulation based on three office application suites - Microsoft Office 97, Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect Suite 8, as well as a web browser, Netscape Navigator. They are quite dated, but should still reflect the usage patterns of users in an office environment using such applications. The test runs through a script that keeps multiple applications open, while it performs tasks that switches between those applications and Netscape Navigator. The result is the average transfer rate during the script run.

High-End Disk WinMark 99 is a real-world simulation based on AVS/Express 3.4, FrontPage 98, MicroStation SE, Photoshop 4.0, Premiere 4.2, Sound Forge 4.0 and Visual C++ 5.0. However, it differs by running the applications serially, instead of simultaneously. There are individual results for each application but in this comparison, we will be looking only at the weighted average score, which is the average transfer rate during the tests.

Unfortunately, WinBench 99 is not fully compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, registering a SetFilePointer error in the Disk Access Time test. So, we were not able to obtain any Disk Access Time results.

In addition, it would keep crashing if the hard drive was tested with a single partition. This is likely due to a limit on the size of the partition that is supported by WinBench 99. We came up with a workaround by dividing the hard disk drive into 5 partitions of equal sizes. We then tested each partition individually and averaged the results.

Usable Capacity

The 4 TB Western Digital Red (WD40EFRX) hard disk drive has an official formatted capacity of 4,000,797 MB. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Microsoft Windows 7.

The actual formatted capacity was 4,000,650,883,072 bytes. This is slightly (650 MB) higher than the official formatted capacity. With about 216 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity remained slightly above 4 TB.

Maximum Surface Temperature

We monitored the surface temperature of seven hard disk drives during their benchmarks. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.

As expected, the 4 TB Western Digital Red (WD40EFRX) ran a little warmer than the 3 TB Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX) because it has an extra platter to spin. However, it was surprising to see that the 4 TB Red idled at a much lower temperature than the 3 TB Red.

It's possible that Western Digital was either more aggressive at spinning the 4 TB Red down, or the 4 TB Red drive spins at a lower spindle speed than the 3 TB Red. We will confirm that in the transfer rate test.

Either way, the low idle and operating temperatures are a big advantage because even with a fan to cool down the drives, it can get pretty toasty inside a NAS.

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