2TB Storage Hard Drive Shootout: WD vs Samsung

Storage has never been faster or cheaper. With a NAS or home server being simple and reasonably cheap to build/buy, it’s no wonder storage drives are popular. But while it may be easy to find or build the NAS/home server to suit you, hard drives can be less clear as to their advantages or pitfalls. I have been looking at two 2TB green drives to determine the best in not only performance but value for money.

The first of the two drives I have been looking at is the Samsung F4 Ecogreen 2TB. This probably needs little introduction but it’s a 5400 RPM SATA II drive with three 667GB platters and 32MB of cache. Against it is the bigger brother of the massively popular WD20EARS. This is, of course, the WD20EARX. With the same platter arrangement but double the cache and a SATA III controller, how does it compete

As an aside, many people recommend to do a quick format every time. I’m not one of those people and so for new drives or old drives I’m cautious about I do a full format. If you don’t know the difference between a full or regular format vs. a quick format then here you go; the main difference is a full/regular format scans the disk for bad sectors and other errors while a quick format does not. Once you know the disk is not damaged then any future formats are fine to be done as quick ones. Rather surprisingly, the time taken for the WD and Samsung drives differed massively. The Samsung drive took 5h and 11m to complete, when the WD took an extra 2 and a half hours making a total format time of 7h 44m. Both drives have the same amount of usable space so I’m not particularly sure where this difference originates.

This is a storage drive test so while they’re ok to be used as boot drives I wouldn’t recommend it. Being 5400RPM green drives means they can be slower than a normal drive, giving a more sluggish feeling to the operating system. As a result of this, I won’t be testing Windows 7 boot times or anything like that. Instead, I will be using ATTO, CrystalDiskMark and PCMark 7 for synthetic tests and some real-world transfers to allow a comparison of what you can really expect.

Starting with ATTO, it’s clear there is quite a difference in the drives. The early tests show the F4EG as being 2-3x faster both reading and writing when compared to the WD drive. Throughout the whole test, writes never show as a strongpoint for the WD20EARX with it never beating, or even really being close to, the F4EG. Reading is another matter, with the WD not only catching up, but beating the Samsung drive in the larger tests. Crystal Disk Mark in some ways tells a similar story to ATTO but not all. The F4EG comfortably wins all of the writing tests. Sequential reads come out weaker on the WD whereas ATTO seemed to show the WD having better read speeds towards the larger transfer sizes. Where it gets really interesting are the remaining read tests. Contrary to what ATTO says, the WD20EARX seems to win when reading smaller files.

WD20EARX vs HD204UI

For PC Mark 7, I used the complete secondary storage test. This runs seven tests which cover everything from gaming to importing pictures and video editing. Rather surprisingly, PCM7 preferred the WD drive by a fair bit giving it a total score of 1612, while the Samsung drive got 1387. Some tests such as adding music show less than a 1% difference between the drives. Others, such as starting applications show a massive difference of the F4EG being -31.9% faster than the WD. Below are the PCM7 results so you can more easily see how the drives differ.

WD20EARX vs HD204UI

My final testing method was transferring files of various sizes. The first test contained 71 files totalling 32.2GB (an average of 464MB per file). These files are and represent video files such as those created by Windows Media Centre when recording TV. Next was 11218 files with an average file size of 2.5MB – this is to demonstrate the transferring of documents and music. Lastly, I used 5870 photos (an average of 0.84MB each) to see how the hard drives would cope with smaller files.

The above table shows the results of these transfers. To generalise a bit, the F4EG seems to be better at writing large files, with it winning the largest two writing tests (average of 464MB and 2.5MB) by 20% and 12% respectively. The WD20EARX won the other four tests with being better at writing the smallest tested files as well as all of the read tests.

To conclude, the mix of results and which drive beats the other in certain tests, I must admit, really confused me. Bearing in mind that both are green drives and have a spindle speed of 5400RPM, neither is a slouch. For the price difference (about £10, at the time of writing) I believe the WD20EARX is worth it. This is a storage drive comparison so you’re not really going to be worried about the write speeds or time taken. You’ll be more likely to care more for the read speeds and that’s where the WD20EARX wins. Having said that and as I said before, the F4EG’s performance is still impressive, so if looking to spend as little as possible then you are still getting a good drive for your money.