What is WD Black speed?

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choucove

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We use the WD Black line of hard drives for the majority of our custom builds. A lot of your throughput performance is going to be dependent upon SATA controller you are using, but when we have these running in AHCI or RAID from the Intel Z77 and Z87 motherboards (SATA 6 Gbps ports) they are averaging about 130 MBps for read and write speed.
 

faisalthegamer

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Does motherboard have effect the speed?? I have H77, and i get just 50-60mbps when i transfer within the hdd. But get 80-90 mbps when transfer to usb 3.0 hdd :O what does this mean?? But if i transfer to usb 2.0 hdd, i get 50-60 mbps only.
 

choucove

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The type of motherboard that you are using, along with the controller on the motherboard that you are connected to and drivers all can have an affect on the hard drive performance. On an Intel H77 chipset motherboard is is recommended to have the hard drive connected to a SATA port controlled directly by the Intel SATA RAID controller. Some motherboards have additional onboard controllers from other vendors to give additional SATA ports. File transfer speed is going to depend largely on the types of files that you are copying. To get the best judge of performance transfer a single very large (multi gigabyte size) instead of many small files.

When you are transferring files are you moving them from one location to another on the same hard drive, or from one physical hard drive connected by SATA to another physical hard drive connected by SATA? USB 3.0 should allow plenty of throughput to allow the drive to transfer at it's maximum throughput depending again on the hard drive, controller, drivers, etc.
 

popatim

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When you transfer a file withing the HDD you are forcing it to read and write at the same time. Remeber you files are broken up according to the cluster size so a 1Mb file would be broken up into 256 4k clusters (or 2048 pieces with 512b clusters) So you hard drive has to read a few clusters, move the head, write a few clusters, move the head back to read some more... This causes the slowdown you see.

When transferring over usb3 you are limited to the speed of whichever device is slower, the HDD or the usb3 device. Since usb3 interface speed is very high it typically does not slow down the devices attached to it.

When transferring over usb2 you are limited to the slowest of either of 3 things: the usb2 interface, the sending device, or the receiving device. 50-60mb/s over usb2 is pretty good imo.
 

choucove

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The difference you are looking at could very well be based on how you are measuring it. I am basing my measurements from proven desktop hard drive benchmarking utilities like HDTune, while your benchmark numbers seem to be from what Windows is reporting as throughput while copying files. This is going to definitely vary the results. Also, be sure not to confuse mbps (megabits per second) with MBps (MegaBytes per second) as there is a very large difference. There are 8 bits to a byte.

Try downloading HDTune or IOMeter and run the utility on your hard drive. That might help you get a better idea of your actual hard drive performance.
 
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