WD RE 4TB Hard Drive Review

One of the best-known storage benchmarking tools is HD Tune, as it’s easy to run, covers a wide-range of testing scenarios, and can do other things such as test for errors, provides SMART information and so forth. For our testing with the program, we run the default benchmark which gives us a minimum, average and maximum speeds along with an access time result, and also the Random Access test, which gives us IOPS information.

While the RE 4TB and Black 2TB banged heads in our PCMark 7 testing, the RE gives itself a fairly strong lead here. While not listed due to it not being re-tested yet, the Black 4TB scored an average 126 MB/s read in HD Tune, which puts this RE 4TB 10 MB/s ahead. Clearly, there are more differences between those two drives than immediately meets the eye.

One thing we’re unsure about is why the write latencies on both the RE and Black drives are much better than expected. The first thing that comes to mind is “cache”, but all drives feature the same amount of on-board cache, are tested the exact same way (and with benchmarks in the exact same order) and are tested twice over. We’ll be pinging WD about this one, in case some light can be shed on this oddity.

Things are about equal between the RE 4TB and Black 2TB in the read IOPS test, but things get a little interesting in the write. There, the RE drive dominates across all four cluster sizes along with the random mix. Nothing can touch the 4KB and 64KB speeds of the VelociRaptor, but this is a great showing overall for the RE drive.