IO Meter

We compared the 6 TB Western Digital Red (WD60EFRX) to the 4 TB Western Digital Red (WD40EFRX). 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 systems.

The 6 TB Western Digital Red may have 20% higher density platters, but that only translates into a slightly faster random access speed than the 4 TB Western Digital Red. This small difference wouldn't be noticeable in a NAS system.

Random Access Time

The 6 TB Western Digital Red's better random read results were confirmed by its random read access times. As you can see, its random access times were slightly shorter than those of the 4 TB Western Digital Red.

CPU Utilization (Random Access)

Throughput (Sequential Access)

This is the most important test for the NAS drives because it shows their ability to read and write files sequentially. The large sequential transfer performance is particularly important since many NAS system deal with large files (larger than 512 KB in this context).

The 6 TB Western Digital Red was much faster than the 4 TB Western Digital Red, thanks to its higher-density platters. The difference was minimal when it came to small sequential reads, which is probably due to the large and fast DDR2 SDRAM cache.

Sequential Access Time

CPU Utilization (Sequential Access)

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