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).

Thanks to its higher areal density, the 3 TB WD Red was second only to the 4 TB Western Digital RE (WD4000FYYZ) in this comparison, edging out even the venerable 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Black (6 Gbps) hard disk drive, even though the WD30EFRX only spins at just over 5,400 RPM while the other two hard disk drives are a speedier 7,200 RPM. 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

Since this is a brand new family, we don't have a preceding drive to compare it to. Neither is there another 3 TB hard disk drive that uses just 3 platters. So we compared it to the 3 TB Caviar Green (WD30EZRX), which has the same spindle speed, cache size, interface and even storage capacity. The only difference is that the Caviar Green uses four 750 GB platters while the WD Red uses just three 1 TB platters.

Thanks to its higher density platters, the WD Red was consistently faster than the Caviar Green, especially at the outer tracks where it was about 23% faster (160 MB/s vs. 130 MB/s). That lead tapered down across the platter, dropping to just 9% at the inner tracks (60 MB/s vs. 55 MB/s).

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