WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Drive RAID Review

Test Procedure & Specifications

Testing a mechanical hard drive’s performance is pretty straightforward and there isn’t much to say about. I will be testing the drive, in this case, the WD Purple 6TB Surveillance hard disk, in a wide a variety of applications to gather as many tests results as possible. In return, it will hopefully allow you to find just the right comparison so you are well equipped with knowledge when you decide what you next storage drive should be.

Test system:

• Supermicro C7Z97-OCE
• Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3
• Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz
• Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
• Sapphire R7 240 2GB
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro 850W
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer

Software used:

• AIDA64 Storage Benchmark
• Anvil’s Storage Utilities
• AS SSD Benchmark
• ATTO Benchmark
• CrystalDiskMark
• PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark
• IOMeter
• HD Tach

I will be creating each possible RAID array through the Intel RAID tool and fully initialize it through the IRST control panel before running each test. I will be running a series of benchmarks with the software mentioned above on each array before destroying it and moving on to the next.

I’ll be using two drives today, which limits me to the RAID 1 and RAID 0 modes and both results will be compared to the single drive performance to show the scalability in performance. The SSD with the operating system is running on a different SATA controller to avoid possible performance impact. Each of the following pages will display a list of screenshots from each test as well as comparison charts for a quick overview.