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ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL
Anvil’s Storage Utilities (ASU) are the most complete test bed available for the solid state drive today. The benchmark displays test results for, not only throughput but also, IOPS and Disk Access Times. Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and use in our benchmark testing.
The Black drive is above the 164 MB/s from manufacture specification in read speed, but is significantly slower in write speed. This is surprising, since so far it has performed beyond its rated speed in our other tests.
HD TUNE PRO
HD Tune is a Hard Disk Utility with many functions from error checking, health testing (S.M.A.R.T.) drive wiping and of course benchmarking.
As we can see from the graph, the drive averaged at 145 MB/s and stayed near the 150 mark for the first half of the test, and as the test went on it started to degrade in speed. This is normal behavior for a mechanical drive.
But again it is below manufacturer specification; that being said it is still faster then most consumer drives.
The writes are more of the same, just a hair slower overall, again averaging a bit slower then manufacturer specification. Access time also is a bit better.
TechnologyX uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience. There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete. The simulations are as follows:
- Windows Defender In Use
- Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
- Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
- Starting the Vista Operating System
- Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
- Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as Xbox
- Cataloging a music library
- Starting applications
WESTERN DIGITAL BLACK SERIES 2TB HDD PCMARK VANTAGE RESULTS
The PCMark score was 5347 and never hit the 164 MB/s that is expected, in a somewhat disappointing result.
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
Based on todays testing results, the Black Series WD2003FZEX 2TB seems like a worthy update from the old Caviar Black drives, and performs quite well. However, we did have a minor gripe with this drive. While it has been much faster than most of the other drives in our test system, it has also been much louder during write activities. So much so that it has become a distraction for me. That being said the noise is countered by the performance of the drive.
All in all the WD Black is very fast, reliable, and has one of the best warranties available. We give it our Gold Seal.
Check out the WD Black drives on Amazon today!
Review Overview
Build Quality
Performance
Price and Availability
Warranty
Fast Premium Storage.
The Black Series lives up to its name and performs very well. For those of you looking for a fast mechanical drive that will last look no further!
Just your basic sponsored ‘review’ here.
No explanation of what the ‘corruption protection’ or any other technology is because they’re just marketing terms and the author of this review has no idea how they even work.
Then we have some synthetic benchmarks which don’t really tell you anything about the hard drive.
But here’s our gold seal of approval anyways!
Get one from our amazon affiliate link!
The benchmark would be more meaningful if other drives were benchmarked as well to give us a comparison point with seagate, other wd models and other wd black capacities. It would be nice to know how the 3tb wd black fair. Do they take a hit on performance due to the larger capacity?