Western Digital Se 4TB Review

For these benchmarks, I wanted to compare the new WD Se drive against the WD Red drive we had previously reviewed. Going into this, I suspect that the WD Se should have a noticeable increase in performance over WD Red, as it shares the same performance charactersitics of the WD Re drive, with just a lower workload rating.

ATTO Disk Benchmark:

 With ATTO, the WD Red drive tops out at about 150MB/sec on writes and 160MB/sec on reads, whereas the WD Se drive tops out at about 170MB/sec on writes and 175MB/sec on reads. The delta between the two drives is at least consistent with the performance claimed by marketing collateral.

CrystalDiskMark:

 With CrystalDiskMark, It’s good to see that the sequential performance is flat for reads and writes on both the Se and Red drives. Additionally, it’s interesting to see that once the queue depth ramps up, that the performance delta between the two drives almost disappears. With this test, I would have to say the performance of the two drives are pretty close, but then it’s important to remember that a particular benchmark isn’t the end all be all.

HD Tune Read:

With HD Tune on reads, the performance delta is surprisingly large. With not only the average MB/sec, but also in the access times. I can only attribute that the intellipower low power spindle speed on the Red drive may be attributing to the high access times and subsequently lower MB/sec performance, which is not a factor for the Se drive.

HD Tune Write:

Although lower average MB/sec on writes then on reads, it’s interesting that the access time trend continues between these two drives.

PCMark 7:

PCMark 7 is a synthetic benchmark that attempts to replicate real world scenaros within a Windows 7 environment. These numbers will appear much lower than the previously supplied benchmarks, but I would say are more indicative of what to expect on a day to day use. I don’t have a comparison run with a WD Red for this particular benchmark, but I will say that these results are not wildly out of line with current gen spinning drives (non-SSD).

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