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 and spindle speed, the Western Digital RE 4 TB (WD4000FYYZ) hard disk drive is the performance leader in this comparison. It is about 18.5% faster than the venerable 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Black (6 Gbps) hard disk drive. In fact, its minimum transfer rate (at the innermost tracks) is just a tad slower than the 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Green's maximum transfer rate!

Platter Transfer Rate Profile

The last Western Digital RE drive we tested was the 2 TB Western Digital RE4-GP, so we used it as the basis for this comparison. Look at how much faster the new 4 TB Western Digital RE (WD4000FYYZ) is, compared to the 2 TB RE4-GP. The tremendous increase in platter transfer rate is partly due to the higher 7,200 RPM spindle speed, but mostly due to the higher areal density.

This allows the 4 TB Western Digital RE to attain a peak transfer rate of about 190 MB/s on the outermost tracks. Even at its innermost tracks, it still managed to deliver a very good transfer rate of about 85 MB/s. If you compare their platter transfer profiles, you will notice that the older RE4-GP will only match the performance of the new WD RE 4 TB drive, when the RE 4 TB is reading or writing at the 3.5 TB point and the RE4-GP is accessing its outermost (fastest) tracks.

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