With peak sequential read/write speeds of 140 and averages of 120 MB/s the 3TB WD Red is around 25% slower than the group leaders. If the Red is used in a NAS (Network Attached Storage), that won't make much difference because the vast majority of home networks still operate at Fast Ethernet (~10 MB/s), even users with faster Gigabit (~100 MB/s) networks will be limited by their network bandwidth before the drive. I could assume that any of our drives are for use in a NAS but that of course doesn't excuse sub-par performance because they could equally be used in a desktop. It's true that the power consumption (4.4W) on the Red is lower than average (6W) but the performance hit isn't justified. Even assuming continuous usage, those extra couple of watts for something like the Seagate Baracuda 7200.14 amount to a few pounds a year at most. At £133 this dive is both overpriced and offers sub-optimal performance. [Feb '14HDrivePro]
The Samsung Spinpoint F3 is over four years old and one of the oldest drives that we have included in our group tests. The reason for its inclusion is that it was once one of the best hard drives available and we have seen more user benchmarks for this drive than any other. The price of this drive has fluctuated significantly over its epic four year life span and current prices do not reflect the great value for money that this drive once represented. In today's market the F3 struggles to keep up with the group leaders both in terms of performance and price. With an effective speed rating of 116 MB/s the F3 is one of the slowest 1TB drives in our group test. There are clearly newer and better alternatives available at this time. [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.