WD RE 4TB Hard Drive Review

Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction – it’s been a staple of PC benchmarking for the better half of a decade. PCMark offers a range of tests to gauge every aspect of a computer’s performance and presents it in a simple final result. Thankfully, it also breaks down the overall score with individual subsystem scores (such as Memory, Storage, et cetera) in addition to providing individual test results.

As we’re not too concerned with the performance of the PC as a whole, for our testing here we deselect all default tests and run only the “Secondary Storage” suite, with the hard drive in question as the chosen drive. Tests in this suite range from the loading of applications, running a Windows Defender scan, editing video, gaming and more.

In our look at WD’s Black 4TB a couple of weeks ago, we saw its performance in PCMark 7 fall behind the Black 2TB – a little odd since we expected it to be about the same. The same thing can’t be said about the RE 4TB, however, as it matches the Black 2TB in the overall test, and flip-flops strengths with it in the rest of the tests. By all accounts, the Black 2TB is a very fast mechanical drive, so for the RE 4TB to match it is very nice to see.