by Rob Williams on May 28, 2013 in Storage
With its “Se” series of enterprise hard drives, WD is targeting those in need of “bulk storage”, whether it be in a datacenter or NAS. Its biggest perk is that it almost perfectly mimics the company’s Re drives, boasting a 5-year warranty, models ranging from 2 – 4TB, and best of all, a price tag of up to $80 less.
Similar to HD Tune, AIDA64’s built-in disk benchmarker is one of the easiest to run. The developer also keeps up on top of architectural trends so that you feel confident that the algorithms don’t get much better than this. This spreads beyond the storage benchmark, as AIDA64’s system stress-testers is one of the best, if not the best, out there – thanks to it being able to take full advantage of any given CPU architecture.
For our testing, we run the Linear Read and Random Write tests. Because AIDA64 by default automatically chooses a cluster size (which changes at random), we force it to use 64KB for our testing.
HD Tune put the Se right behind the Re in terms of performance, but AIDA64 puts Se ahead overall – outside of the maximum write.
AIDA64’s transfer tests didn’t perfectly align with HD Tune’s, but the access time results do.