IO Meter

We compared the 6 TB Western Digital Black (WD6001FZWX) to the 6 TB Western Digital Green (WD60EZRX). 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 Black was obviously much faster than the 6 TB Western Digital Green. This is the reason why people pay top dollar for a WD Black drive, the Western Digital VelociRaptor or an SSD. It's not for the higher sustained transfer rate but the significantly better random access performance.

Random Access Time

The significantly lower random access time are entirely due to the higher spindle speed, because the 6 TB Western Digital Black uses the same platter (with the same areal density) as the 6 TB Western Digital Green.

CPU Utilization (Random Access)

Although we generally don't bother much about CPU utilization in the age of quad-core processors, it's interesting to note that the 6 TB Western Digital Black uses 2-3x more CPU time than the 6 TB Western Digital Green.

Throughput (Sequential Access)

These are the second most important tests for boot drives, and the most important tests for secondary storage drives. The large sequential transfer performance is particularly important because they are often used to store large game or media files, which are all practically larger than than 512 KB these days.

It comes to no surprise that the 6 TB Western Digital Black is faster than the 6 TB Western Digital Green. Its much faster small read and write performance is thanks to its higher spindle speed, and won't be seen if Western Digital merely used higher-density platters.

Sequential Access Time

CPU Utilization (Sequential Access)

Even when it comes to sequential accesses, the 6 TB Western Digital Black uses a lot more CPU time than the 6 TB Western Digital Green. Of course, it doesn't really matter all that much with high-performance processors we use today.

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