Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB Review (Page 6 of 10)

Page 6 - Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0

About HD Tach 3.0.1.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Next, I fired the Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB up for some testing in one of the oldest programs in the history of storage benchmarks, HD Tach. While HD Tach is more of a drag race than a clear indication of real life performance, it is an excellent storage performance reference among SSDs with the same controller and has been our favorite benchmark long before hard drives even cracked the 50MB/s mark. With an average read speed of 1303.8MB/s, this score was a lot lower than I thought it would be. For comparison, the Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB came in at 1446.4MB/s, while the Kingston KC2500 1TB posted 1590.6MB/s. For most NVMe solid state drives, we typically look for something that is faster than 800MB/s. From our experience, most drives do not crack the 400MB/s line. At the end of the day, HD Tach may not be the best test for solid state drives all the time, but these results are always interesting to look at.


Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
9. Benchmark: PCMark 10
10. Conclusion