When the first event music, “Video Killed the Radio Star” premiered on MTV in 1981, it started a video revolution. A lot has changed since then, but video’s relevance in our culture, has increased, and our lives and security have come to depend on it.
Market research firm IHS estimates that one surveillance camera has been installed for every eight people (about 40M) in the U.S. alone. Stats from 2014 certainly back that up – according to the IHS Video Surveillance Intelligence Service Market Insight report from August 2015, the U.S. was ranked as the second largest market for video surveillance equipment, worth $2.8 billion dollars.
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With our obsession over video and corresponding camera capabilities such as HD and 4K, it’s easy to miss an equally crucial component that can make or break the effectiveness of an entire surveillance system: storage. Unfortunately, many surveillance professionals are using the wrong drive.
Rather than being designed for continuous capture of HD or FHD video from multiple cameras, a drive that is not optimized for surveillance systems can drop frames, or even consume more power, generating more heat to create a major reliability issue. This could drastically reduce the life of a drive, adversely affecting the read and write operations in a surveillance system. These solution may cost the customer less upfront, but eventually could affect your business when performance, reliability and even your reputation.
The right surveillance storage solution offer high performance, efficiency and capacity that has been tested in harsh surveillance environments. But how to tell the difference?
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: What to Look For In Surveillance Storage
There are several specific things to look for when evaluating whether a drive has been designed with surveillance in mind:
Always on: A surveillance system works 24×7. If the storage drive hasn’t been designed for constant, never-ending read/write operations, it won’t be able to keep up.
Performance Reliability: Some drives, like WD’s Purple surveillance-class hard drive family, include special technology (called AllFrame in this case) that improves playback performance and works with ATA streaming to reduce errors and frame loss.
RAID-enabled: To increase peace-of-mind for your customer, you may also want to look for a drive with RAID or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk capabilities. A drive with this capability can use two or more hard disks to create a safety net for failed hardware by ensuring that the image is still being captured even if one drive isn’t working. This lessens interruptions in productivity and decreases the chance of data loss.
Low power consumption: While “low power consumption” might not be first on your list of things to look for in a hard drive, the need for always-on capability makes this crucial. Having a drive that calculates the optimum seek speeds won’t generate as much heat, even in passively-cooled storage enclosures, making it more reliable and friendlier to your customer’s wallet.
High camera count support: A high number of cameras, an NVR system or a longer retention period will require higher storage use and an even greater need to ensure you have chosen a drive that will meet the customer’s needs. Look for one with up to 6 TB of capacity on a single drive.
High system bay count support: The right drive will include hardware vibration sensors to enable higher drive-count systems as well as higher system and hard drive workloads.
Extensive compatibility with cameras: Needless to say, the drive you select needs to work with the cameras you are planning to install. One that works with most of the different cameras you could install will make it even easier to keep the right drive on-hand, regardless of your current installation scenario.
Rugged exterior: In some cases the drive may need to live, and perform continuously in harsh environments. In this case, you’ll want one with tarnish-resistant PCBA protection.
Easily upgradable: In an ideal world, your customer occasionally asks to upgrade or expand their existing surveillance system. A drive that scales with a system when the need to expand arises and makes your job easier.
Considering the importance of storage in surveillance systems, you may also find it helpful to use a capacity calculator to help determine how much storage is needed for the length of time data is to be maintained for a particular surveillance system. Vendors like WD offer calculators and drive selection tools to help find the right drive and capacity that best suits your needs.
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2 March 2016 – Western Digital Corporation today announced the expansion of its award-winning portfolio of performance storage solutions with 8TB capacity drives for NAS, video surveillance and desktop external applications. Increasingly centralized, rich-content, which continues to grow in popularity among enterprises, small business and consumers alike, is driving demand for greater storage capacities.
Launching throughout the first half of 2016, My Cloud personal storage devices (My Cloud, My Cloud Mirror, My Cloud EX2 Ultra), My Book external hard drives (My Book, My Book for Mac, My Book Duo and My Book Pro), WD Red, WD Red Pro and WD Purple hard drives will all be designed with the new high-capacity configuration. Each storage solution offers purpose-driven engineering and HelioSeal helium-technology with the new 8TB drives for maximum and efficient performance in the applications for which each model is designed.
The increase to 8TB or 16TB (with two 8TB drives in RAID 0) capacity applies to the following WD products:
External Hard Drives
[adrotate banner=”4″]My Book/My Book for Mac -– An external hard drive solution that provides complete backup and storage with USB connectivity.
My Book Duo/My Book Pro – Dual-drive external hard drive solutions which provide ultra-fast storage in RAID-0 and complete backup and storage with USB and/or Thunderbolt connectivity and up to 16TB capacity.
My Cloud/My Cloud Mirror – A personal storage device that plugs into your router at home to provide consumers with their very own private cloud.
My Cloud EX2 Ultra – As part of the creative professional series of My Cloud products, the My Cloud EX2 Ultra provides high-performance two-bay network attached storage.
Internal Hard Drives
WD Purple – Engineered for 24/7, always-on, high-definition surveillance security systems that use up to eight hard drives and up to 32 cameras
WD Red – Optimized for personal, home and small business NAS (network attached storage) systems
WD Red Pro – Optimized for small business and enterprise class NAS systems with high performance and reliability.
Availability and Pricing
My Book 8TB will be available in March at select retailers and is distributed by Eternal Asia (M) Sdn Bhd in Malaysia. Manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) for the My Book 8TB (model #: WDBFJK0080HBK) is RM 1,499.00 (~US$ 359).
My Cloud, My Book for Mac, My Book Duo, My Book Pro, WD Red and WD Purple 8TB configurations will be available during the first half of 2016.
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15.6″ Full HD WLED-backlit IPS Display (1920×1080)
Memory
8 GB DDR3L – 1 DIMM
Storage
1 TB 5400 RPM Hard Disk Drive
Primary Battery
3-cell 55.5 WHr Lithium-ion Battery
Optical drive
SuperMulti DVD burner
Keyboard
Backlit Keyboard
Personalization
HP TrueVision HD Webcam with Dual Digital Microphone
Fingerprint Reader
Networking
Intel 802.11ac WLAN and Bluetooth(R) [1×1]
Audio
Bang & Olufsen with 4 speakers and 1 subwoofer
HP ENVY 15t Design & Build
The top cover and rear display cover of the HP ENVY 15t laptop is made of aluminium. The display bezel and bottom cover, on the other hand, is made of plastic. The display bezel has some play when I press it on the top left corner. The display doesn’t sit flush against the main chassis either. I’m not sure if this is part of the design, but the gap in the middle actually helps me lift up the display.
To keep the quad-core Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor cool, the HP ENVY 15t laptop has large cooling vents at the bottom, as well as out the back. There are perforations on the underside on both sides near the front – they are the vents for two of the four Bang & Olufsen speakers.
The designers of the HP ENVY 15t designed the display so that it actually elevates the rear end of the laptop away from the table surface. This improves ventilation under the laptop, which is usually a dead space.
On the left side, you will find the power connector, an AC/battery light, the RJ-45 network lights and jack, a HDMI port, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 3.0 charging port, a headphone/microphone port, and an SD Card reader.
On the right side of the HP ENVY 15t, you will find the Power and hard disk drive activity lights, a security cable slot, the optical drive and a USB 3.0 port.
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HP ENVY 15t Display
HP offers two WLED-backlit display options with the HP ENVY 15t laptop – a standard display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 display, or an IPS display with a higher resolution of 1920 x 1080. I would recommend the 1920 x 1080 IPS display. This particular laptop used an IPS display made by LG.
Touchpad & Keyboard
The HP ENVY 15t‘s touchpad is fairly big which is nice, but it requires too much force to click. I end up using one or two finger taps instead of the hidden TouchPad button. The back-lit keyboard came standard. No real complaints about the keyboard’s performance. The keyboard’s a little chatty, but at least it doesn’t flex.
That can’t be said for their attention to detail. The keys were not centered properly – there is a noticeably larger gap on the left side of the keys. The silver-on-silver colour scheme actually accentuated the misalignment of the keys.
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WLAN & Bluetooth
The HP ENVY 15t comes with three WLAN options – a 802.11b/g/n module, or an Intel Dual-Band Wireless-AC with either 1×1 or 2×2 stream capability. This particular laptop was equipped with a Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165 module with 1×1 stream.
Battery & Power Supply
The HP ENVY 15t comes with a built-in 3-cell lithium-ion battery with a battery capacity of 55.5 WHr. HP rates the ENVY 15t laptop as capable of running for up to 9.5 hours on this small battery. This is probably based on the dual-core configuration. I managed to squeeze out 4.5 hours of battery life playing YouTube videos.
The HP website states that the ENVY 15t configurations with integrated graphics comes with a 45 W power brick. However, it is only true for the dual-core configurations, which are not currently being offered. The sole configuration with integrated graphics was the Intel quad-core configuration – it comes with a larger 90 W power brick.
Storage
All HP ENVY 15t configurations allow you to opt for a 5400 RPM hard disk drive with a storage capacity of either 1 TB or 2 TB. If you opt for the 4 GB discrete GPU configuration, you can opt for a dual-storage combination of a 256 GB solid state drive, with a secondary 1 TB 5400 RPM hard disk drive.
M.2 solder points without a socket on the i7-6700HQ quad-core configuration
In case you are wondering, the 256 GB SSD is an M.2 module. However, the lack of an M.2 socket on the motherboard of this quad-core configuration prevents you from adding your own M.2 SSD upgrade.
Solid State Drive (SSD) Upgrade
Since HP did not offer the SSD option for their Intel Core i7-6700HQ configuration, I decided to swap in one of my 2.5″ SSDs.
Accessing the internal of the HP ENVY 15t requires the removal of the optical drive (1 screw), and the base enclosure (14 screws). The base enclosure is made of plastic, and is fragile near the optical drive section.
The battery cable has to be removed before you can service any components.
To remove the hard drive drive from its bracket, the battery must first be disconnected and removed (5 screws). A sloppy LED board ribbon cable can be seen after the removal of the hard drive. I had to correct that…
After swapping the SSD into the bracket, I encountered a problem – the speaker cable was caught under the SSD. Attempts to reroute it around the SSD caused it to be too snug. In the end, I had to loosen the cable to reroute it. During reassembly, I manage to bend one of the battery connector pins. That shows how fragile these components can be, so be careful!
My Verdict
The HP ENVY 15t laptop laptop offers one of the cheapest quad-core Intel processor configurations in the market, if you do not need discrete graphics.
However, its internal design leaves much to be desired. Upgrading its RAM or swapping its HDD for an SSD will not be an easy task for mainstream users due to the many crucial steps they will need to take. They also have to be very careful about what they are doing.
Aside from its interior sloppiness, the laptop feels solid.
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What I liked
1920 x 1080 IPS display
Fingerprint scanner
Large touchpad
What I disliked
M.2 socket only available with the 4 GB discrete graphic card configuration (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M)
Non-easily accessible panel
Touchpad requires too much force to click (ended up using tap function, instead of click)
Lack of SSD option (not a big deal since it’s cheaper to buy one on your own to replace the HDD)
Some sloppiness in assembly
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ARMD is actually short for ATAPI Removable Media Device. It refers to devices that use removable media. Examples include the LS-120, Magneto-Optical (MO) and Zip drives.
To boot up any operating system from these drives, it is essential for them to emulate a floppy drive or a hard disk drive. This is especially true for older operating systems like DOS.
This BIOS feature allows you to select the type of emulation used during the boot sequence.
When set to Auto, the BIOS automatically sets the emulation type used by ARMD drives.
When set to Floppy, ARMD drives will emulate a floppy drive at boot up.
When set to Hard Disk Drive, the ARMD will emulate a hard disk drive at boot up.
To be safe, this BIOS feature should be set to Floppy. It is the safest emulation type, and the one that most accurately describes ARMD drives. They are, after all, more like large-capacity floppy drives than hard disk drives.
Details
ARMD is actually short for ATAPI Removable Media Device. It refers to devices that use removable media. Examples include the LS-120, Magneto-Optical (MO) and Zip drives.
To boot up any operating system from these drives, it is essential for them to emulate a floppy drive or a hard disk drive. This is especially true for older operating systems like DOS.
This BIOS feature allows you to select the type of emulation used during the boot sequence.
When set to Auto, the BIOS automatically sets the emulation type used by ARMD drives.
When set to Floppy, ARMD drives will emulate a floppy drive at boot up.
When set to Hard Disk Drive, the ARMD will emulate a hard disk drive at boot up.
Emulating the hard disk drive may provide better performance, if the operating system supports a disk cache. However, that may introduce data synchronization problems should you eject the media before the disk cache has a chance to write to the media.
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Emulating a floppy drive does not normally present with this problem. Only reads from floppy drives are normally cached, thereby avoiding this problem. In addition, certain operating systems (e.g. Windows XP) will only load drivers from a floppy drive during the installation process.
If you desire better performance, you should set this BIOS feature to Hard Disk Drive. However, you must treat the device like a hard disk drive and refrain from ejecting the media unless you are sure the cached data has been written to it.
To be safe, this BIOS feature should be set to Floppy. It is the safest emulation type, and the one that most accurately describes ARMD drives. They are, after all, more like large-capacity floppy drives than hard disk drives.
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Western Digital has finally moved into the Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) market with their new WD Blue SSHD drives.
The WD Blue family of mainstream 5400 RPM drives is designed for less strenous use at home and in the office. Like their now-discontinued WD Green family, the emphasis is on reduced power consumption , thermal output and cost, instead of high performance.
That changes with the SSHD variant, which pairs a regular WD Blue drive with an 8 GB SSD. These hybrid drives are able to offer pseudo-SSD performance with the storage capacity and lower cost of regular hard disk drives.
8 GB NAND flash for blazing performance – An optimal amount of built-in NAND flash SSD technology enables WD Blue SSHDs to perform at up to four to five times faster than traditional 5400 rpm HDDs, based on PCMark Vantage.
Self-learning technology – Utilizing an advanced set of algorithms, WD Blue SSHDs track SSHD data usage, prioritizing frequently used data for fast access in the solid state portion of the device, adapting, learning and optimizing as new applications and command requests change over time. These advanced algorithms reside in the SSHD firmware, enabling it to make intelligent determinations of which data to store in NAND flash memory, without any influence from the host or related storage device drivers. By pairing SSD-like performance with massive hard drive capacity, WD has created an intelligent hybrid drive that truly offers the best of both worlds.
Synergy delivers value – WD Blue SSHD is equipped with the optimal amount of NAND flash to deliver fast, SSD-like performance over high-capacity storage, significantly lowering the $/GB compared to the higher cost and lower capacity of standalone SSDs.
Simple installation with no special software required – The WD Blue SSHD hybrid drive is self-contained in a traditional HDD form factor, and installs as easily as any traditional hard drive without special drivers or downloads required. WD Blue SSHDs are compatible with most typical computer configurations, including PC and Mac.
• 6.5 W (Spin-Up)
• 1.65 W (Read / Write)
• 0.65 W (Idle)
• 0.225 W (Standby / Sleep)
• 3.7 W (Write)
• 3.1 W (Read)
• 1.1 W (Idle)
• 0.53 W (Standby / Sleep)
Ambient Temperature
• 0 °C to 60 °C
(Operating)
• -40 °C to 70 °C (Non-Operating)
• 0 °C to 60 °C
(Operating)
• -40 °C to 70 °C (Non-Operating)
Maximum Shock
• 400 G @ 2 ms (Read)
• 1000 G @ 2 ms (Non-Operating)
• 350 G @ 2 ms (Read)
• 1000 G @ 1 ms (Non-Operating)
Drive Acoustics
• 24 dBA average (Idle Mode)
• 25 dBA average (Performance Seek Mode)
• 22 dBA average (Idle Mode)
• 24 dBA average (Performance Seek Mode)
Non-Recoverable
Read Errors
• 1 error per 1014 bits read
• < 1 error per 1015 bits read
Load/Unload Cycles
• 600,000 (minimum)
• 600,000 (minimum)
MTBF
• NA
• NA
Warranty
• 3 Years Limited Warranty
• 3 Years Limited Warranty
Lowest Price
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Packaging
The 1 TB WD Blue (WD10J31X) SSHD came in a sealed anti-static plastic packet, with a sachet of desiccants inside to keep it dry. To remove it, just tear off the top or cut it open, and slide out the drive.
Be sure to ground yourself before removing and handling the hard disk drive as static can damage it. In particular, you should try to avoid touching the exposed PCB located on the lower underside of the drive.
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The WD Blue SSHD (WD10J31X)
Despite having an SSD built-in, the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD looks just like any other 2.5″ notebook hard disk drive. It has a label on the top plate and an uncovered PCB on the underside. The label has a lot of important information, like the hard drive model, storage capacity as well as its date and place of manufacture.
This particular drive was manufactured here in Malaysia on the 28th of May, 2015. Interestingly, Western Digital also added a QR code so you can scan it using your smartphone to learn more about the WD Blue SSHD.
SSHD Vs. Dual Drive
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SSHD is short for Solid State Hybrid Drive. It combines a small SSD with a regular hard disk drive. It is not the same thing as a dual drive, like the WD Black2, which is essentially an SSD with a HDD in a single enclosure.
The WD Blue SSHD comes with a much smaller SSD and uses it as a cache. This allows the drive to deliver pseudo-SSD performance at much lower price points. Its SSD component is not user-accessible, unlike the SSD component in a dual drive.
Unlike the WD Black2, there is no special requirement. It behaves just like any other hard disk drive, just with an SSD serving as a secondary cache.
Connectors & Jumpers
This is a Serial ATA hard drive, with native support for SATA 6 Gb/s. However, it is backward-compatible so you will have no problem using it with older SATA 3 Gb/s controllers.
The SATA 6 Gb/s interface is necessary for optimal performance since this Western Digital Blue SSHD boasts a maximum sustained internal (platter-to-buffer) transfer rate of 100 MB/s, and a large and fast DDR2 SDRAM cache.
Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard disk drive to your PC while it’s still running.
To the left of the SATA connectors is the jumper block. However, Western Digital does not provide any jumper with their drives. This is because the jumper block should only be used in exceptional cases.
According to Western Digital, jumpering pins 1 and 2 enables Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC). Placing the jumper across pins 5 and 6 will force the drive to use the slower SATA 3Gbits/s transfer speed. This is only necessary for certain SATA controllers that do not properly implement the SATA 6 Gb/s speed negotiation.
Breather Holes
The 1 TB WD Blue SSHD has a small breather hole on the top plate, just above the warning about not covering any drive holes. This hole must not be covered.
Breather holes allow condensation inside the hard disk drive to escape. They also equalize the hard disk drive’s internal pressure with the ambient air pressure. The hard disk drive needs them to function properly, so please make sure you do not occlude these holes.
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What’s Under The PCB
Western Digital has a penchant for keeping all surface-mounted components on the reverse side of the PCB – to prevent static damage and to allow for better cooling. It’s protected by a thin foam cutout on the chassis side, with a thermal pad to help transfer heat from the HDD controller to the hard disk drive chassis.
The 1 TB WD Blue (WD10J31X) SSHD used the Marvell 88i9441 Soleil-H SSHD controller. It comes with two 600 MHz ARM Cortex-R4 processors and supports hardware 256-bit AES encryption, Native Command Queueing and a 6 Gb/s SATA interface.
To manage the integrated 8 GB flash memory, Western Digital used the JMicron JMF608 NAND flash controller. It supports up to 4 read/write channels at up to 300 Mbits/s (read) and 200 Mbits/s (write) per channel. That works out to a maximum throughput of 150 MB/s (read) and 100 MB/s (write).
The primary cache remains the 64 MB Winbond W9751G6KB-25 DDR2 SDRAM chip – the same memory chip used by the 6 TB Western Digital Red drive. This is is a newer version of the memory chip used in the 4 TB Western Digital RE (WD4000FYYZ), with an operating speed of 800 MHz, 4 memory banks and faster timings of 5-5-5. This gives it a peak transfer rate of 200 MB/s.
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To tie the SSD and HDD components together, Western Digital used the Marvell 88SE9171 PCI Express 2.0 x1 to SATA 6Gb/s switch. This is a 2-port SATA switch.
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We tested in both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, with the latest updates. We chose to use IO Meter 2008 as well as our “old faithful”, WinBench 99 2.0, with the following tests :
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Platter Data Transfer Profile
Business Disk WinMark 99
High-End Disk WinMark 99
Disk Transfer Rate (Beginning)
Disk Transfer Rate (End)
Business Disk WinMark 99 is a real-world simulation based on three office application suites – Microsoft Office 97, Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect Suite 8, as well as a web browser, Netscape Navigator. They are quite dated, but should still reflect the usage patterns of users in an office environment using such applications. The test runs through a script that keeps multiple applications open, while it performs tasks that switches between those applications and Netscape Navigator. The result is the average transfer rate during the script run.
High-End Disk WinMark 99 is a real-world simulation based on AVS/Express 3.4, FrontPage 98, MicroStation SE, Photoshop 4.0, Premiere 4.2, Sound Forge 4.0 and Visual C++ 5.0. However, it differs by running the applications serially, instead of simultaneously. There are individual results for each application but in this comparison, we will be looking only at the weighted average score, which is the average transfer rate during the tests.
Unfortunately, WinBench 99 is not fully compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, registering a SetFilePointer error in the Disk Access Time test. So, we were not able to obtain any Disk Access Time results.
In addition, it would keep crashing if the hard drive was tested with a single partition. This is likely due to a limit on the size of the partition that is supported by WinBench 99. We came up with a workaround by dividing the hard disk drive into 5 partitions of equal sizes. We then tested each partition individually and averaged the results.
Usable Capacity
The 1 TB WD Blue SSHD (WD10J31X) has an official formatted capacity of 1,000 GB. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Microsoft Windows 7.
The actual formatted capacity was 1,000,202,039,296 bytes, which is 202 MB lower than the official storage capacity. With about 125 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity remained slightly above 1 TB.
Maximum Surface Temperature
We monitored the surface temperature of seven hard disk drives during their benchmarks. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.
Due to the extra chips and NAND flash memory, the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD has a high idle temperature. It hit a peak case temperature of 23°C above ambient temperature. This can be a concern inside the confines of a laptop case. This drive is designed to run in relatively hot environments, with a peak ambient temperature of 60°C.
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Transfer Rate Range
This chart shows you the range of platter-to-buffer transfer rates from the innermost track to the outermost track. In other words, it shows you the range of disk transfer rates of the hard disk drives (from minimum to maximum).
Western Digital rates the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD with a peak throughput of 100 MB/s, but our test shows that it will actually hit 113 MB/s. As you can see, it has exactly the same transfer rate range as the 1 TB WD Blue Slim (WD10SPCX), which is really the HDD component of this SSHD.
Platter Profile
The platter profile of the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD we received was very good. There were no noticeable dips in throughput that would signify a significant use of replacement sectors. Lots of them would point to poor platter quality.
We also compared its platter profile to that of the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD, its direct competitor. You can see that the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD starts off with a higher throughput but the Seagate Laptop SSHD is faster from around the 300 GB point onwards.
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The small random reads and writes are the most important tests for applications that make a lot of random accesses, so those would be key performance indicators for drives that are used as boot or system drives, but not very important for NAS or media storage drives.
In this regard, the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD would make a much better boot drive than the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD. It was almost 14% faster in small accesses and 52% faster in large random writes!
The downside though is higher CPU utilization by the drive. Despite the large difference in percentage, this is really minor due to the high performance CPUs we use today.
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Sequential Throughput
Test
1 TB WD
Blue SSHD
1 TB Seagate
Laptop SSHD
Difference
512 KB Read
190.00 MB/s
108.31 MB/s
+ 75.4%
512 KB Write
102.77 MB/s
110.22 MB/s
– 6.8%
4 KB Read
31.74 MB/s
52.48 MB/s
– 39.5%
4 KB Write
32.12 MB/s
48.14 MB/s
– 33.3%
These are the second most important tests for boot drives, and the most important tests for secondary storage drives. The large sequential transfer performance is particularly important because they are often used to store large game or media files, which are all practically larger than than 512 KB these days.
The 1 TB WD Blue SSHD was phenomenal at large reads, delivering a throughput of 190 MB/s. On the other hand, it was slightly slower at large writes, and 30-40% slower at small reads and writes.
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Our Verdict
Western Digital is very late to the Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) market. Seagate launched the industry’s first SSHD, the Seagate Momentus PSD, back in 2007. It has taken Western Digital 8 years to dip their toes into SSHDs, but we are glad to see that they are off to a good start.
Like all other SSHDs, the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD (WD10J31X) uses a small 8 GB SSD as a fast secondary cache, in addition to the usual SDRAM cache.
This flash memory cache quickly stores all writes to drive, copying them over to the slower hard disk drive over time. Because it retains the written data, the data can be read from the much faster flash memory cache. This improves its read performance, albeit only for the data that is still stored in the cache.
Thanks to its flash memory cache, the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD was about 70% faster than the 1 TB WD Blue Slim (WD10SPCX) in the WinMark tests. This is the same hard disk drive the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD uses, so we can see the effect the small SSD cache has on its real world performance. It was also 20-40% faster than the 750 GB WD Scorpio Black, a high-performance mobile hard disk drive that features a much higher 7200 RPM spindle speed.
The 1 TB WD Blue SSHD could have performed better if Western Digital opted for a better flash controller than the JMF608. This is a 4-channel flash controller limited to 150 MB/s (read) and 100 MB/s (write). Western Digital would do well to use a faster flash controller if they want to maximise the performance of their future SSHDs.
The 1 TB WD Blue SSHD (WD10J31X) is no SSD, but it offers pseudo-SSD performance in the performance aspect that the hard disk drive is weakest at – random accesses. That’s why it “feels” like you are using an SSD. Even though it’s not quite as fast as a real SSD, it comes with an enormous storage capacity and costs far less per GB.
The 1 TB WD Blue SSHD is best used as a boot drive, if you have a dual-spindle laptop that supports two drives. It is also a great upgrade option for older laptops – giving them a new lease of life, thanks to its significantly better performance and storage capacity.
We are very pleased with the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD‘s performance, and we think it deserves our Reviewer’s Choice Award. Congratulations, Western Digital!
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