WD Se 4TB Enterprise 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.

The Se drive continues its impressive performance trend here, scoring the best minimum results among the sub-10K drives, and great average speeds overall. Access times-wise, the Se performs well, but falls quite a bit behind the Re with regards to the writes.

Can someone please explain this one? Up to this point, the Se drive hasn’t performed too different than the Re, but here, it even surpasses the VelociRaptor in some regards. It’s performance so good, that either WD packed in 1TB platters (unlikely, given that’d be a first for a 7,200 RPM drive), or the company specifically tuned the firmware for IOPS performance. The latter explanation would make sense, given these drives are suited for potential cloud storage and large NASes.