Results: Temperature, Power Consumption, And Efficiency
After the Desktop HDD.15’s strong, but certainly not impressive performance in our read and write tests, the 4 TB disk finally gets to face a few tests where it can excel.
For starters, its operating temperature is only 32 degrees Celsius, which means it's not even warm to the touch. Western Digital's Red WD30EFRX is even cooler at 31 degrees Celsius. The 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda has an operating temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, which is still well within an acceptable range.
Power Consumption
The Desktop HDD.15 and Western Digital Red WD30EFRX do battle for the honor of turning in the lowest power consumption results for a 3.5" hard drive. Even though the WD drive barely bests Seagate in the end, a 3.6 W measurement at idle and 5.9 W reading at peak write speed are both excellent numbers.
Efficiency
Dividing power consumption by read and write performance gives us an efficiency result for each disk. This is a good way to figure out which usage scenario the drives are best-suited to.
Seagate's Desktop HDD.15 ST4000DM000 plays in the big leagues once again, and it’s only beaten by the Western Digital Red WD30EFRX when we calculate the efficiency in streaming writes and database operations.
