Since I talked about how wonderful the newer Western Digital Black 6Gbps SATA III hard drives are a couple of days ago, I thought I would run CrystalDiskMark on a couple of different models in that line, along with a couple of other drives I had easy access to. First is a 128GB Crucial Real SSD C300 SATA III drive from last year, shown in Figure 1. This drive is plugged into a 6Gbps SATA III port on an X58 chipset motherboard. Write throughput is hurt because it is a 128GB drive (with fewer available NAND chips and channels compared to a 256GB model).

Figure 1: 128GB Crucial Real SSD C300

The second drive is a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive, which has a 4GB SLC NAND chip that is used as a read cache in front of the conventional hard drive. As it turns out, a hybrid hard drive like this is no match for a real SSD from a performance perspective. It is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: 500GB Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive

Next, we have a 2TB Western Digital Black WD2002FAEX SATA III drive. This is the model with a 64MB cache, and as you can see in Figure 3, it is quite fast. It actually has better sequential write throughput than the 128GB Crucial C300 SSD.

Figure 3: 2TB Western Digital Black SATA III Drive

Finally, I have a basically identical 1TB Western Digital Black WD1002FAEX SATA III drive.  It has pretty much the same performance as the larger model. It is shown in Figure 4. Either one of these WD drives would be a good choice for a transaction log drive in a desktop development or test system.

Figure 4: 1TB Western Digital Black SATA III Drive