Just a few years ago, the main criteria in choosing a hard drive are its volume and speed, while other parameters were considered unimportant and often not taken into account. Now the situation has changed, and as a pioneer was the company Western Digital, offer users a “color-differentiation” of their products. The result was that pretty girl phrase “I want that one over there, little red” no longer seems strange, even in a computer store

Now all the stores are divided into types, each model has its purpose. Red and blue, black and green – according to the manufacturers, each of these discs should work in a particular system. And if in one case, the manufacturer is focusing on achieving maximum productivity, while in other situations it may be just the opposite – the speed is reduced for greater reliability and energy efficiency.

Let’s look at a few of these drives and try to figure out what is the advantage of various models of drives.

Seagate Desktop SSHD

Not so long ago in the line of drives from Seagate drives were a new type – SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive). These drives are a hybrid of a conventional hard drive, and a small solid state drive, which with the help of special software combines high speed and large capacity SSD classic hard drives.

The model considered ST4000DX001 belongs to the third generation of hybrid devices company Seagate, the first being a 4-terabyte SSHD-disc issued in the form factor of 3.5 inches.

The model carries a four-plate capacity of 1TB each, and also has a built-in SSD 8GB. When this rotation speed is 5900 r / min, and the interface connection – SATA III technology NCQ.

However, the main secret of the device – its solid-state part. With Seagate Adaptive Memory technology hybrid drive automatically determines the most frequently used data and records them on the built-in SSD. As a result of the application requested and the system itself is loaded considerably faster than when using the conventional disc. Thus, in the popular test applications drive Seagate ST4000DX001 demonstrated very good performance speed – about 170 Mbit / s read and 180 MB / s when writing.

Seagate NAS HDD

A series of hard drives Seagate NAS HDD, intended for use as part of network drives, includes models with a range of capacities from 2 to 4 TB.

Provided for testing model ST4000VN000 has four plate capacity of 1000 GB, rotating at a speed of 5900 rev / min, 64 MB buffer and SATA-3 interface.

The main difference from conventional disks is the presence of four special operating modes for optimal network drives. In the first two of these parks the recording heads off and stopping the engine, whereas in the next two, these functions are involved.

In performance tests the device showed very good results, it is appropriate to its price category, so that the drive can be safely recommend to buy, not only for the systems of NAS, but also to work as part of a standard PC.

Western Digital

Western Digital, offers the user several Russian rulers drives with different performance and recommended usage. Series WD Blue provides basic performance for mainstream applications, WD Green includes quiet and “cold” model of large capacity, WD Black allows you to get the maximum performance for demanding applications, WD Red is designed for installation in network drives and WD Purple, according to the manufacturers should maintain smooth operation in the surveillance.

Most popular among home users ruler Green, presented in our review 4-terabyte model WD40EZRX, has a relatively low cost of storage, low power consumption and heat dissipation, and low noise. The price for this is the low productivity, and, interestingly, the exact speed of rotation of the hard disk platters in this series in the official documentation is not specified.

In contrast to the “green” brother, WD Black WD4003FZEX of 4-TB demonstrates excellent performance due to high speed rotation of the plates and 64 MB of cache memory, which controls the dual microprocessor.

“Red” WD40EFRX disk capacity 4TB is designed to work around the clock to provide uninterrupted small home server or NAS. Its size is 64 MB buffer, but the spindle speed modestly silent for designation IntelliPower. Connection interface – SATA-III, and the data rate is estimated at 150 MB / s.

Finally, we considered “purple” brother index WD40PURX – a tireless workaholic, designed to capture a video of various ages intruders. The drive support JavaScript AllFrame, which reduces the number of errors, because of which can decay images or dropped frames during video recording, which sometimes happens in the case of conventional HDD. In addition, this series of drives technology is implemented TLER, allowing to minimize the likelihood of downtime RAID-array when an error occurs in one of the drives. In this case, the necessary correction is postponed for the time when the system is idle, allowing uninterrupted data record.

Of course, when special drives are used for their intended purpose, one of the main parameters is reliability. Alas, evaluate it in the laboratory is not possible, so we have seen from the data provided by the manufacturer. So, for WD Red indicates the number of parking spaces equal to 600,000, MTBF estimated one million hours and the warranty is three years. However, there is one point – in Russia warranty engaged in the final sellers. Consequently, there may be situations in which the customer will be given a shorter period than the manufacturer says.

Results

Summarizing the results of our testing, we should say that we have considered all the drives are really able to provide secure storage and rapid movement of the user data.

As for specialization, it is necessary to recognize that it is indeed feasible. New models acquire the qualities needed to work in the RAID-arrays, video equipment, servers and cloud storage. Of course, they can be used in conventional computers, only here does it make sense? Speed indicators such drives a little worse, and the price of storage is the same or even slightly higher than the desktop counterparts.

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