WD RED 2.5-Inch 1TB in Four-Disk RAID Review

Test Procedure

Test system:

• Supermicro C7Z97-OCE motherboard
• Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3
• Corsair Vengeance 16GB
• Corsair H100i
• BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 10 850W
• Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD

We would like to thank BeQuiet, Corsair, Supermicro, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components.

Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible.

Software used:

• AIDA64 Engineer
• Anvil’s Storage Utilities
• AS SSD Benchmark
• ATTO Disk Benchmark
• CrystalDiskMark

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 four drives in all the tests except RAID 1 mode that only allows two disks to be used. 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.