High-Capacity Business Hard Drives: Biggest Of The Bunch

Results: Efficiency, Temperature And Noise

Power Efficiency (Performance per Watt)

If you divide the streaming read performance by the required power at this workload, you’ll receive these efficiency numbers. Since the performance difference between the drives is less significant than the power consumption variance between the fastest and the slowest drives, power consumption has more impact on the results of the 5,x00 RPM drives.

The same applies to the workstation I/O efficiency test. Keep in mind that the WD RE4 and the 7,200 RPM drives are much faster than the other drives, but they clearly require more power at this workload.

Surface Temperature

No surprises here. More platters translate into higher surface temperature. Rotation speed appears to be of secondary interest.

Drive Noise

More platters again translate into negative results. For this reason, the 2 TB drives with four platters make the most noise, although the subjective difference is smaller than what the charts might suggest.