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 1TB Barracuda 7200.14 boasts impressive peak sequential read/write Lab speeds of 195/193 MB/s. These best case burst speeds indicate what the Barracuda is capable of under Lab perfect test conditions. Our real world benchmarks have been sourced from hundreds of users and give a better sense of how well this drive actually performs on a day to day basis. The 1TB 7200.14 has an average UBM sequential read/write speed of 147 MB/s, which is a superb result, especially for a budget drive. With 4K random read/write speeds of 0.77/1.53 MB/s small file performance is also respectable making the 1TB Barracuda a very good all round performer. In terms of value for money the relatively small 1TB drive is not as good value as its larger 3TB sibling but in the 1 TB category this is one of the best value for money drives available. [Jan '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.