Video games graphics gets better and better every year and you don’t really have to be a hardcore gamer to actually notice that improvement. Components like graphics card, processor, memory is no doubt the parts that majority users will focus more on to improve their gaming experience, but what about the storage?
As most of us is aware of the seemingly increasing sizes of the folder of the AAA titles that can easily reach 30GB or more and some might take up more than just a few seconds for the game to actually load into the screen before the game is even playable. Large capacity SSD, performance hard drives or hybrid setup (SSD for Operating System, HDD for storage), this has been one of the never-ending debate of all time just like the Intel vs. AMD, NVIDIA vs. AMD thingy that has been going on for ages.
The Speed: Synthetic Benchmark vs. Running Games
Intel 520 Series 240GB
WD Blue 1TB
WD Black 6TB
From synthetic benchmark like the CrystalDiskMark used here, we can see the sequential read and write speed of the WD Black 6TB we have here that is pretty close to what a SATA II SSD can do. If you were to compare the numbers directly to a SATA III SSD with sequential read and write speed of 500+ MB/s, there’s no way a WD Black drive can get close to that performance without going for at least RAID 0 setup.
Still, the synthetic benchmark result alone doesn’t actually tell the whole story. While there’s no way a WD Black can beat a SSD single-handedly, the game loading test result that we’ve recorded as per the graphs above. The 3 selected titles are known to have annoyingly long loading time before the game can be played.
There’s no deny that the SSD is a clear winner here but if you were to look at the difference in terms of the loading time, we’d say that the WD Black stays on the sweet spot in between speed and capacity. It’s not the best of course, but it’s clear that it perform at least 15% better than the mainstream, budget-friendly WD Blue drive.
The Cost Per GB: SSD vs HDD
Just to provide you an insight on the games we have, they’re pretty much all AAA titles i.e Rise of the Tomb Raider, For Honor, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Grand Theft Auto V, Watch Dogs 2, DOOM, etc, which all takes up quite a significant amount of space on the drives.
A hard drive seems to be more feasible if you need more storage, but of course, you can go for a SSD with larger capacity if you can afford one. A decent 1TB SSD would cost you somewhere around RM 1399, which gives you a rough RM 1.40 per GB, whereas a WD Black 6TB performance hard drive that comes with a very close price point of RM 1429 gives you a rough RM 0.24 per GB.
The Verdict
So, is the WD Black really worth the money? With the results shown, it’s a yes and no from us.
The Yes: If your concern is more towards the amount of storage you’re getting and paying RM 1399 for a 1TB SSD doesn’t seems to be a good deal, then the WD Black 6TB that performs almost 15% better than a WD Blue is something that is worth for your consideration.
The No: If that 15% difference doesn’t really concerns you and you’re good to go with a hybrid setup which consists a blazing fast SSD and a average hard drive, then the WD Black isn’t really something you should look into.
