WD Black 2TB vs WD Gold 2TB for daily use - single drive, any real numbers?

Zaporro

Honorable
Jan 23, 2014
249
0
10,710
Hi,

As its get a little suffocating on my tiny WD Black 500GB I'm using right now I decided to upgrade my HDD for something bigger. I've been long standing user of WD drives, mostly because of their hassle free warranty that's why i want to keep using WD drives.
The purpose of drive will be daily use as in title, meaning storing/playing games from it, storing/watching media from it (movies/music). There will be some content creation involved, encoding videos directly to HDD, work with CAD models and projects spread into multiple files.

So, i have two kind of obvious candidates as in title:
- WD Black 2TB WD2003FZEX
- WD Gold 2TB WD2005FBYZ

Both of these drives are priced almost exactly same in my country (im some shops the black is a bit more expensive like ~3 to 5 USD, in others the gold is more expensive). I already checked their spec sheets so many times i have them memorized:

The Black has:
- Sustained Host to/from drive 164 MB/s
- Cache 64MB
- Load/unload 300000 cycles
- Power requirements 9.5/8.1/1.3 RW/Idle/STB
- Acoustics 29/34 Idle/Seek

The Gold has:
- Sustained Host to/from drive 200MB/s
- Cache 128MB
- Load/unload 600000 cycles
- Power requirements 7.4/5.9/- RW/Idle/STB
- Acoustics 25/28 Idle/Seek

In meantime i read through this whole thread http://www.overclock.net/forum/20-h...wd-gold-my-main-pc-storing-movies-series.html but generally it does not tell me anything that i don't know, there is a talk there that "Gold has different firmware", "Its optimized for servers and NAS" and stating the obvious by repeating WD site "Gold is enterprise drive, Black is consumer". The thread tho lacks any sort of benchmarks on discussed drives and the discussion itself died out.

The only helpful benchmark i found online is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMZwymjJEFM he is like the only person ever benchmarking WD Gold in single drive configuration and showing some actual numbers... unfortunately he does it with a 100MiB test size (whereas 1GiB would be more reliable) so anyway, in there WD Gold 2TB in single mode reaches (Read/Write MB/s):
- Seq Q32T1 203.7/231.3
- 4K Q32T 19.28/3.415
- Seq 202.0/233.4
- 4K 18.70/3.438

Now the thing I'm missing is someone who benchmarked WD Black 2TB drive the same way, or even better, compared directly WD Black to WD Gold in that drive size, because benchmark results may vary from disk total capacity and current free capacity right? That's why i don't find my own WD Black 500GB tests reliable (made on a partition with 4GB of space left, the total space left on drive is like 45GB), they are as below btw:
- Seq Q32T1 166.2/120.2
- 4K Q32T 2.802/2.522
.....
- 4K Q8T8 2.681/2.609
- 4k Q1T1 1.316/2.444

So yeah, do you think my current WD Black tests in CrystalDiskMark are reliable (given its free space and that I'm trying to compare it to a 2TB drive)?
Does anybody have a WD Black 2TB drive and can run a CrystalDiskMark on it?
Or even better, anybody have both WD Gold and WD Black drives to compare in CrystalDiskMark?
 
Solution
I like how they test the gold with only 100mb, so the whole dataset fits into the much faster cache which explains the fabulous 4k performance.

Both drives have similar performance where consumers need it so choose the one with the longer warranty.

popatim

Titan
Moderator
I like how they test the gold with only 100mb, so the whole dataset fits into the much faster cache which explains the fabulous 4k performance.

Both drives have similar performance where consumers need it so choose the one with the longer warranty.
 
Solution

Zaporro

Honorable
Jan 23, 2014
249
0
10,710
MERGED QUESTION
Question from Zaporro : "To any user of these hard drives: WD Black 1TB, WD Black 2TB, WD Gold 1TB, WD Gold 2TB - share a Cristal Disk Mark test please"

To any user of these hard drives: WD Black 1TB, WD Black 2TB, WD Gold 1TB, WD Gold 2TB (running in single drive configuration, no RAID, no NAS).

Could you please do a Cristal Disk Mark 6.0.0 (https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/) test on your hard drive using these settings:

- Test size: 1GiB

- Tests to run: 3

- Tests: ALL

And share your results, telling me which drive did you test, please?