WD Black 6.0TB Hard Drive Review

Unlike the edgy graphics we used to have in the early days, games nowadays has evolved to a state where most object you've seen in-game is realistically portrayed according to the actual thing in the real world. As result, the size of the game folder expanded tremendously to a point where each game folder could take up to 30GB or even more. Instead of getting more and more 1.0TB / 2.0TB hard drives for your system, investing in a high capacity hard drive of 4.0TB or more will be a much wiser choice.

The WD Black 6.0TB hard drive arrived at Tech Critter lab just recently, million thanks to Western Digital and ROOTS Asia Pacific for sending over the WD Black 6.0TB for today's review. Among the hard drives lineup that Western Digital has, the WD Black are the hard drive that is specifically designed for users who demands for more performance. While it comes with a jaw dropping price of $349.99 (approximately RM1480), let's put the price aside for now and find out what kind of performance can we expect from the WD Black 6.0TB. 

Specifications

Overview

WD Black drives can be easily distinguished by its black colored label. The size of the WD Black 6.0TB doesn't seems to be much of a difference to any of the lower capacity WD drives we've seen.

The PCB at the back of the WD Black 6.0TB does looks a lot bigger than other drives we've seen in the recent years.

Compared side by side with a WD Blue of previous generation (front).

Compared side by side with a WD Blue of previous generation (back).

Testing Method

Test Rig Configuration
CPU Cooler	Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
CPU	Intel Core i7 4790K
Motherboard	ASUS Maximus Hero VII
Memory	G.Skill TridentX @2400MHz
Primary Hard Drive	-
Power Supply	be quiet! Straight Power 10 600W
Chassis	Vector BenchCase

Synthetic Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The most frequently used benchmarking utility by many manufacturers for performance specification. As ATTO Disk Benchmark uses compressible data rather than compressible data, it results in higher benchmark scores. We've ran the benchmark with transfer size ranged from 0.5KB to 8192KB and total length of the test to be 256MB.

CrystalDiskMark

Developed by a Japanese coder that goes by the nickname Hiyohiyo, CrystalDiskMark is one of the most frequent used Benchmark utility to measure the read and write performance of the storage drive. There's 2 option for the test data used, compressible (0 fill) and incompressible (1 fill).

Anvil's  Storage Utilities

By far the most complete SSD Benchmark utility available. The Anvil's Storage Utilities not only comes with the standard SSD Benchmark function, it also includes other functions such as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests and option to configure the compressibility of the test data.

Real World Performance

We've ran several test involving launching some of the very recent game titles,  various commonly used software to simulate the real world scenario using the WD Black 6.0TB and one of the most commonly used WD Blue 1.0TB among most users. 

Verdict

It's no doubt that the WD Black 6.0TB's 240MB/s read and 220MB/s write speed is nothing closer to a blazing fast SSD with 500+MB/s read and write speed. Still, it does makes a lot of difference when it is compared against the conventional WD blue drive, especially for the 5GB file transfer and launching Witcher III: The Wild Hunt test we have conducted.

While its not the drive that everyone would go for, the WD Black 6.0TB would benefit users who seeks for a storage device that falls in the sweet spot between the consideration of capacity, overall performance and price - it's a 6.0TB hard drive, cost just about the same as a 1.0TB SSD and it performs faster than the conventional WD Blue 1.0TB drive.