Benchmark Results: Seek Times And I/O Performance
Western Digital's WD4001FAEX is one of the faster drives in our read seek time benchmark. At 16.18 milliseconds, it places within a tight cluster of the six fastest drives separated by just 1.5 milliseconds.
Write seek time is one of the Black drive's strong suits. It takes a second-place finish at 6.95 milliseconds.
As we might have hypothesized after seeing the previous page's 4 KB random read/write benchmark results, the WD4001FAEX is a middle-of-the-pack performer in our database, file server, Web server, and workstation workloads.
Of course, in a world with SSDs in it, 20 IOPS up or down means very little. The folks running applications dependent on I/O throughput already know solid-state storage is the way to go. So, a lackluster showing in these tests is hardly what we're going to agonize over.
