On to 4TB
While SSDs have might in the advantage in speed, traditional mechanical hard disks still trump their flash memory counterparts when it comes to capacity. Even today, most capacity consumer-grade SSDs top out at 512GB, whereas 1TB hard disks are commonplace while 2TB and 3TB hard disks are no longer novelties.
Western Digital is one of the leading hard disks manufacturers and following in the footsteps of the recently reviewed VelociRaptor, they’ve also released a new 4TB drive to bolster the ranks of their popular WD Black series. Drives of this capacity aren't new, but it's only recently that high performance 7,200rpm models are coming to market. Previously, you could only obtain the mainstream 5,400rpm variety that are targeted for mass storage/archival purposes.
For those unfamiliar with Western Digital’s offerings, drives from the Caviar Black series represent the company’s performance line of mechanical hard disks for consumers. To distinguish the Black hard disks from the rest of the company’s drives, they come with 5-year warranties and they all spin at 7,200rpm - the norm for performance mechanical hard disks.
It looks just like any other drive, but it packs 4TB of storage space. That's enough for roughly 800 hours of videos, 800,000 high-res photos or 1,000,000 songs.
The new 4TB model is no different. And top of that it also has dual integrated processors and a large 64MB cache for prefetching requests to improve performance. As part of Western Digital’s commitment to reliability and longevity, the drive also features NoTouch Ramp technology, which ensures that the recording head never touches the disk, thus reducing wear and ensures no accidental contact.
Lastly, unique to the 2TB and 4TB Black models, the drive also features Western Digital’s StableTrac technology, where the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce vibration of the platters. According to Western Digital, a more stable platter improves tracking accuracy and performance.
SATA 6Gbps is the standard interface for performance storage drives these days and the WD Black 4TB is no different.
With this drive, its 4TB capacity is achieved by using five 800GB platters, as opposed to four 1TB ones. There’s pros and cons to such a configuration. Generally, the lesser the number of platters, the better the seek times and throughput since platter density, hence data density is greater, thus more data can be read by the same read/write head. Other aspects with less platters is reduced weight, less complexity, lower power consumption and tends to be more reliable. However with five smaller 800GB platters, performance might be better when transferring large contiguous files with more hard disk platters in operation concurrently.
Physically, the drive looks just like any other 3.5-inch form factor mechanical hard disk, except that at 780g, it felt substantially heavier than the 1TB drives that we are used to since the latter are usually simple single-platter drives.
Test Setup
The drives were tested on our storage testbed, which has the following system specifications:
- Intel Core i5-2400 (3.1GHz)
- MSI Z68A-GD80 (Intel Z68 chipset)
- 2 x 4GB DDR3-1600MHz memory
- MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
- Windows 7
The list of SSDs tested are as follows:
- Western Digital Black 4TB
- Western Digital Black 1TB
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB
To evaluate the new WD Black 4TB’s performance characteristics, we will be comparing it against the popular 1TB model from the same Caviar Black lineup. Additionally, we have included results from the new and recently tested 1TB VelociRaptor drive and also the older 300GB VelociRaptor drive. And since we’ve shown in the review of the 1TB VelociRaptor that even the latest and fastest mechanical hard disks are no much for even run-of-the-mill SSDs, we will refrain from including results from SSDs in this comparison.
The list of benchmarks used are as follows:
- AS-SSD benchmark 1.6.4
- HD Tune Pro 4.6
- CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
- PCMark 7
- PCMark Vantage
- Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
AS SSD Results
AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. Usually, we run this benchmark on SSDs to remove the advantage of the SandForce-driven drives, but it’s still a good benchmark to see how mechanical hard disks deal with non-compressible data.
Sequential read and write speeds of the WD Black 4TB was pretty impressive as it was markedly quicker than even the old 300GB VelociRaptor drive and also the WD Black 1TB drive. This was also true for its copy speeds in the Copy Benchmark, which simulated copy workloads. However, on the more intensive 4k and 4k, 64 thread workloads, the VelociRaptor drives gained the upper hand.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results
CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB, 4KB (queue depth 32) and 512KB data.
The WD Black 4TB drive exhibited strong read and write speeds on the sequential and 512k workloads as it was convincingly quicker than the 1TB variant of the WD Black and also the old VelociRaptor drive. However, it lost its advantage when coming to the 4k and 4k, 32 queue depth workloads. While the previously reviewed 1TB VelociRaptor drive was no match for SSDs, it was leaps and bounds ahead of all the drives here.
HD Tune Pro Results
HD Tune is a popular storage benchmarking utility that measures read and write speeds as well as random access performance.
Read and write performance of the new WD Black 4TB drive was generally impressive as it was markedly quicker than both its 1TB sibling and the old 300GB VelociRaptor drive - by around 20%. Nevertheless, it was outclassed by the latest 1TB VelociRaptor drive.
Looking at random access performance, the Caviar Black 4TB was just about on a par with the 1TB variant. The 300GB VelociRaptor drive, which was earlier outclassed by the Caviar Black 4TB, managed to claw back a win and posted appreciably higher average speeds and lower access times.
Futuremark PCMark 7 Results
PCMark 7 is the latest benchmarking suite from FutureMark that evaluates the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.
The new WD Black 4TB drive has performed admirably thus far, but it stuttered on PCMark 7, recording a mere 1336 PCMarks. This was over 35% less than the WD Black 1TB’s 2108 PCMarks. This was also less than half of what the blazing quick VelociRaptor 1TB drive scored.
Futuremark PCMark Vantage Results
PCMark Vantage might have been around for quite some time, but it is still a fairly accurate representation of how the drives might be used in real-world scenarios. We are focusing on the hard drive test suite which comprises of tasks such as loading of applications to media creation.
On PCMark Vantage, the WD Black 4TB and 1TB drives recorded almost identical scores - 5320 vs. 5262 PCMarks. However, if you were to examine the breakdown of the scores, you would find that the 4TB drives excelled on certain workloads while the 1TB drive did better on others. Leading the pack here was the new 1TB VelociRaptor drive.
Iometer Results (Part 1)
Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face. A more taxing queue depth would be appropriate for enterprise usage scenarios, but since most of our tests lately have been pro-consumer with SSD reviews, we'll focus on how it might matter to end-users.
Looking at the 64k streaming read and write workloads, we can see that the WD Black 4TB drive held a comfortable lead over the 1TB variant and also the older 300GB VelociRaptor drive. However, on the more enterprise-related intensive file and web server workloads, the WD Black 4TB drive recorded the poorest scores. Those workloads tend to be more harsh and requires faster access times, which the multi-platter 4TB drive couldn't cope as well as the single-platter 1TB counterpart.
Iometer Results (Part 2)
Lastly, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. In terms of response times, the 64k streaming read and write response times for the WD Black 4TB drive was generally better than the WD Black 1TB and the older 300GB VelociRaptor drive. However, timings took a significant turn for the worse when coming to the file and web server workloads, which also explained its poor IOPs reading in these two workloads on the previous page. As explained, this is likely attributed to the five-platter hard drive design used.
Capacity x Performance
Looking at the results from our grueling benchmarks, the new WD Black 4TB offers a good blend of both capacity and performance. Sequential read and write performance is generally very good thanks to its use of five smaller 800GB platters, allowing it to trump both the Caviar Black 1TB drive and also the old 300GB VelociRaptor drive. Only the new 10,000prm VelociRaptor drive had better sequential read and write performance.
However, with multiple platters to access, random read and write speeds took an inevitable beating. Nevertheless, it was still on a par mostly with the 1TB variant of the WD Black. But it trailed the two VelociRaptor drives by around 20%. The only two benchmarks that gave it noticeable problems were PCMark 7 and also Iometer, where it did below average on the "File" and "Web Server" workloads. That said, overall performance was still decent, especially for a drive with this much capacity.
For users who want lots of storage but don't want to sacrifice on performance, this is the drive for you.
In terms of value, the 4TB variant of the WD Black currently retails for around S$416, while the 1TB drive goes for around $130. It's also more affordable than Hitachi's competing 7200rpm 4TB drive, which currently retails for S$550. However, 3TB drives from Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba, which typically retails for around $170 - $200 are, terabyte for terabyte, more value for money. However, these do not come with the 5-year long warranty that Western Digital offers on their Black drives. This is currently one of the longest warranties offered for storage drives, as competitors such as Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba only offer two to three year warranties. If you're wondering if there's a premium charged by WD for the largest capacity drive, fortunately that's not the case since the 2TB WD Black model goes for a little more than S$226. That means the reviewed 4TB model is well priced when compared within the WD Black family.
To drill down to how much it costs per gigabyte, the WD Black 4TB costs S$0.104 per gigabyte. The highest performing mechanical drive, the VelocirRaptor 1TB drive, fared about S$0.355 per gigabyte. A high performance SSD at this point of time ranges between S$1.17 to S$1.35 per gigabyte.
All in all, the new WD Black 4TB is a praiseworthy drive for anyone who is looking for lots of storage and also performance (from a mechanical hard drive). Before we end, do note that not all motherboards can boot to a 4TB drive. You need one that supports UEFI BIOS booting and you’d also need a 64-bit copy of your OS. However, if you only want to use the drive for purely data, you can install to your system and partition it as a GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk.
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