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 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 is 3.5" desktop hard drive. Like its 2TB sibling, the DT01ACA300 sports a rotation speed of 7,200 RPM and has a relatively low peak/idle power draw of 6.4/5.2 Watts. With peak sequential read/write speeds of 197/183 MBps and peak 4k read/write speeds of 1.17/2.19 Mbps the 3TB DT01ACA300 achieves an effective speed of 143 MBps which places the DT01ACA300 amongst the top handful of 3TB drives. Pricing of the DT01ACA300 is also very aggressive which makes the DT01ACA300 a superb value proposition. Comparing the DT01ACA300 and Barracuda shows that the DT01ACA300 is marginally faster but also slightly more expensive. [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.