Surveillance Hard Drive Shoot-Out: WD And Seagate Square Off

Results: WD Surveillance Benchmark, Distributions

For the first test case, WD is the clear winner with 59% of its reads completing in under 5 ms. The Surveillance HDD has its read completion times distributed in the 10-40 ms span.

In the next two test cases, Seagate takes a slight lead, with a higher percentage of completions in the 10 to 20 ms range. The WD Purple also reports a much higher percentage of completions greater than 80 ms. We were hoping that the great results from the first test case would carry over to others, but both drives look similar in these subsequent runs.