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 ST1000DX001 is a Solid State Hard Drive (SSHD). There is 8GB of MLC NAND flash built into this model which helps facilitate better performance than a purely mechanical drive. The peak sequential read /write speeds of 190 MB/s are around 10% higher than average for a mechanical drive, but no where near typical SSD speeds. We have seen peak 4k write speeds as high as 5.72 MB/s, which is very impressive and to date the highest 4k read speed is 1.24 MB/s which is less impressive but still above average for a top end mechanical drive. The performance increases attributable to the NAND flash are primarily noticeable in the area of small file performance and the Seagate offers only marginally better sequential performance than other mechanical 1TB hard drives. Overall the ST1000DX001 is a very solid performer and bests the group average by 30%. The larger 2TB version (ST2000DX001) has similar performance but represents even better value for money. [Feb '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.