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 Seagate Desktop SSHD is a Solid State Hard Drive (SSHD). The 8GBs of MLC NAND flash built into this model help facilitate better performance than a purely mechanical drive. Peak sequential read/write speeds are above average at 190 MB/s. The 2TB SSHD has consistently demonstrated class leading 4k random write speeds in the region of 5.0 MB/s. 4K read speeds are in the region of 0.7-0.9 MB/s which is well above average, but not record breaking. Overall the performance increases attributable to the NAND flash are very noticeable in the area of small file 4K performance where the SSHD dominates the competition. In terms of sequential speeds, the Seagate also offers better average sequential performance than most mechanical 2TB hard drives. From a value for money perspective, the 2TB SSHD is well above average, it has a brilliant 4k performance profile, strong sequential speeds and only a slightly above average price. [Dec '13HDrivePro]
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.