- Performance - Page 1

The drive is brand new and has the latest firmware installed. Let’s start our tests. The advertised "sustained transfer speed" is around 255ΜΒ/sec. The AJA System Test gives a rough idea of the drive's performance. We got around 240MB/sec reading/writing speed.

The ATTO Disk benchmark gives us more details:

Above 8K files we got around 255mb/sec reading and 245mb/sec writing speeds. The same performance also came from the ATTO Disk Benchmark v4.00.

Passing to the CrystalDiskMark software we got results from 3.01, 6.02, 7 and the latest 8.01 versions. The performance in all cases is similar for the sequential reading/writing speed.

Our test with IOMeter doesn’t give us much high score, since traditional HDDs are not very good with a lot of small files.

Via HWInfo we monitored the drive's internal temperatures (HDD was placed inside a properly cooled full tower case). As we saw we got very good temperatures from 29 to 37 Celsius. HWInfo also monitors the reported max reading/writing speed with 259 and 263MB/sec.

- Conclusion

The WD Gold series is a product that aims for Enterprise users or NAS users. WD offers many different product lineups at this category from 1TB up to 16TB. While the RED and RED Pro series are very famous among users, the GOLD series seems to be a step ahead either in performance and reliability. The prices of the 8T HDD for the Red Pro and Gold series are similar. The drive is advertised at capable of reaching 255MB/sec which was confirmed from our tests. As happens with all traditional mechanical HDDs, loads with very small files will make the HDD perform much worse, so in that case an SSD would be a better solution.

The drive also comes with good temperatures and good operation consumption. The noise levels were minimal and, in all tests, we couldn’t hear the drive working inside a properly closed PC case. The operating fans produced much higher noise. Lastly the product is armed with 5 years of warranty to keep end users worry free. Overall we feel that this product is very solid and we have no problem suggesting it for all users who wish to upgrade their storage NAS needs.