The WD Purple is a surveillance drive with low power consumption and a design that's optimized for 24x7 operation. There is actually little beyond marketing that separates the Purple from the Red and Green drives. They all share almost identical hardware. The thing that does differentiate the Purple drives is their firmware which supports AllFrame, a surveillance specific feature. Allframe handles the cache in a way that is optimized for video streams. The AllFrame technology however is only enabled when used in conjunction with a supported host controller, most of which are only found in dedicated NVR (Network Video Recording) devices. As a result there is no benefit in using this drive in a HTPC to record video streams, because the surveillance specific functions won't be enabled. In terms of effective speed the Purple lags the new Red and Green drives by around 26%. [Oct '14HDrivePro]
The 2TB Toshiba DT01ACA200 is a 3.5" desktop hard drive. This model sports a rotation speed of 7,200 RPM and is reasonably power efficient for a 2TB desktop drive consuming just 6.4 Watts when loaded and 5.2 Watts when idle. The DT01ACA200 has impressive performance with peak sequential read/write speeds of 193/182 MB/s and peak 4k read/write speeds of 1.16/2.28 MBps. These raw figures produce an effective speed of 141 MBps which ranks the 2TB DT01ACA200 amongst the top handful of 2TB hard drives. Not only is the 2TB DT01ACA200 a great performer but it is also priced aggressively and therefore represents superb value for money for a 2TB capacity drive. Comparing the 2TB and 3TB versions shows that performance is very similar but the 3TB offers 50% more capacity for just 25% more cash which makes the difference between good and great value for money. [Nov '14HDrivePro]
We calculate effective speed which measures performance for typical consumers. Effective speed is adjusted by current cost per GB to yield value for money. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top HDDs. [HDrivePro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.