WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Drive Review

AIDA64 Engineer

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AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. It provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring.

It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one we’ll be using.

Linear Performance

The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives, as the name says, a linear view on the drives overall performance from start to end.

Random Performance

The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are actually a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation.

Access Times

The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface.

The WD Purple 6TB surveillance hard drive shows right away where its strength lies during the AIDA benchmarks. A drive that is designed to handle a lot of HD cameras at the same time also needs to be able to perform well with random operations, and it does. Where the linear performance runs around 130MB/s, the random goes up to 175MB/s and stays above the 100MB/s most of the time. A good result. The access times around 20ms are pretty much as we would expect them to be on a drive like this.