Western Digital Black 8TB HDD Review: Not Back in Black

Comparison Products 

The 8TB WD Black HDD is up against other HDDs we have on hand, which includes a few 20TB models: WD’s Red Pro, the Seagate Skyhawk AI, the Seagate Exos X20, and the Seagate IronWolf Pro. 8TB competition includes the WD Blue, the Seagate FireCuda, the Seagate BarraCuda, the Seagate IronWolf Pro, and the older HGST UltraStar He8. Representatives of other capacity points include the 6TB WD Black, the 12TB WD Red Plus, the 14TB Toshiba X300, and the 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

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The Black lives up to its “performance-optimized” for gaming claim with solid 3DMark results. It is faster than the Seagate FireCuda in this test, although not by a huge amount.

SSDs are the real competition, though. We recommend SSDs for games as loading times can see significant improvement. HDDs have their place for back burner games, though, particularly if you cannot download fast or consistently.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

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The FireCuda is 11% faster than the WD Black in the overall score in PCMark 10, though. However, the Black is 17% faster than the WD Blue.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

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DiskBench brings disappointing results for the Black. The faster version of this 8TB model, which comes with a 256MB cache and a higher transfer rate, would perform more closely to the Seagate FireCuda in this test. However, this pared-back 128MB version of the 8TB WD Blue trails woefully in this test — the FireCuda is 56% faster at writing the files. 

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that storage vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

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The Black could be better with smaller block sizes, but it performs fine with the more typical larger ones. This is reflected in the Crystal Disk Mark sequential tests where the Black does quite all right, although it can’t quite keep up with the FireCuda in write workloads.

The Black's performance in random workloads is better than on the SMR BarraCuda, older He8, and the lower-RPM Blue, with acceptable random write latency. Random read latency is more disappointing as the Black falls behind even the Toshiba X300. This is not an area where hard drives are expected to shine, though.

Sustained Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most HDDs implement a write cache which is a fast area of volatile memory such as DRAM.  Sustained write speeds directly hit the platters and tend to be consistent. There are exceptions to both of these statements as there are SSHDs (flash-containing hybrid HDDs), OptiNAND drives, and SMR drives that deviate from the traditional configuration. We use Iometer to detect the maximum sustained write speed of the HDD.

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Sustained write performance is not bad, but it is below expectations for a higher-end drive. The other 8TB model would perform at a higher level, but in the current market, this model is the one that’s available and facing Seagate competition. The overall performance profile makes this particular Black more of a compromise. Current pricing favors the Seagate FireCuda, even if that’s been elevated since our review.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some drives can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

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One saving grace for the Black could have been with power consumption. Alas, the drive is not very efficient, and the Blue does much better. If you really need the extra performance, the FireCuda makes more sense.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

Conclusion

The Black is supposed to be Western Digital’s top-of-the-line consumer hard drive, but it doesn’t feel like it. Some compromises are made to get the price down on the 8TB model that we tested, which includes halving the cache and a lower sustained transfer rate in comparison to the more expensive and harder-to-find 8TB with 256 MB of cache and the 10TB SKU. This is all fine and good if it results in lower pricing, but the Seagate FireCuda offers better performance and efficiency at around the same cost. And if extra space is all you need, WD’s Blue is a far better bargain.

The Black’s one claim to fame might be its gaming performance, but you're probably using an SSD for games at this point. If you're not, you should be. Game loading times are far better on an SSD, and you can always re-download games if capacity is short. You might choose to store games that you don't frequently play on a hard drive and then transfer them back to the SSD later, but it’s probably not worth the Black’s premium just to keep games stored on a secondary drive— the WD Blue can get you CMR technology and capacity at a far lower price-per-TB. The Seagate FireCuda, for its part, nets you the best performance if you need it for a high-end desktop or workstation.

The WD Black does have a better warranty than the WD Blue, though, and it has a much wider capacity range than the Seagate FireCuda. This perhaps makes it more compelling at certain capacities and price points. This could be at 6TB and 10TB, although the latter is veering into NAS territory. We wouldn’t recommend the Black at 8TB as it stands. It’s not a bad drive by any means, and it operated reliably without any major surprises. It’s just nothing special in the current market.

Overall, the current weak availability and high pricing for the 8TB Black, in particular, makes it a hard sell against the faster Seagate FireCuda or the much cheaper WD Blue. It does demonstrate good 3DMark gaming performance, but this is not a huge selling point as SSDs offer a much better experience when it comes to gaming load times. There are better options for raw capacity and for workstation or NAS use, too.

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