Western Digital Red Review: Are NAS-optimized HDDs Worth the Premium?
by Ganesh T S on August 17, 2012 4:20 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Western Digital
- NAS
Stress Testing and Effects of Prolonged Usage
Readers of our other NAS reviews might be aware that we are in the process of building a NAS testbed capable of testing mult-client scenarios. While the details of the testbed will come in a separate piece next week, we will describe the relevant part of the system in this section. Since the Synology DS211+ performed the best amongst the three tested NAS systems and is also officially recommended by WD, we chose it for stress testing. The DS211+ was configured with 2 x 3TB WD Red drives in RAID-1 and connected to a Zyxel GS2200 switch. A dual Xeon workstation was set up to run 12 Windows 7 VMs (each with a dedicated physical disk and a dedicated GbE port connected to the switch). Scripts were set up to do a synchronized data copy from each VM to a Samba share on the DS211+. We paused the scripts after the NAS became 30%, 60% and 90% full to repeat our benchmarks from the previous section. Each 30% step took approximately 15 - 20 hours. A screenshot of the status of the Samba share after the process was completed (90% full) is shown below.
At 90% full, the NAS had more than 7 million files in almost a million folders. 95% of the files were between 0 and 512 KB in size. 1.8% were between 0.5 and 1 MB, 2.8% between 1 and 10 MB, 0.2% between 10 and 100 MB, 0.03% between 100 and 1024 MB, and 360 files were more than 1 GB in size.
The results of running the NASPT / robocopy benchmarks at each stage are provided in the graph below. Note that the NASPT tests were run from one of the VMs in the new testbed, and some of the results could be slightly different from what was obtained with our Summer 2012 NAS testbed.
The above benchmarks show that the performance does degrade (particularly for write intensive benchmarks) as the NAS fills up. However, the big gap that we saw in the raw drive performance (in the HD Tune Pro benchmarks) doesn't seem to be as evident when the disk is being used inside a NAS. In any case, it is always advisable to run any NAS below 90% of the capacity.
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Peroxyde - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
Thank you very much for the thorough explanation. With too much emphasis on NAS usage with the Red, I am still wondering if technically they can still function as a single drive outside of a NAS. Should people who don't have NAS device avoid buying the RED drives?Let's try a real example:
USB 3.0 External Drive: I hesitate between Caviar Black 1 TB, 5 years warranty, $100 et WD Red 2 TB, 3 years warranty $140. I am torn between the 5 years warranty of the black and the 2TB of the red. Reliability is the most important. This external drive will travel often and will be frequently powered on/off. What would you choose? Reply
vgray35@hotmail.com - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
BLACK is cheaper but quality is a lot better than GREEN and BLUE, and BLACK may well be a good choice reliability wise.If RED is good for multi-drive RAID.operation, then it is definitely very good in terms of reliability in single drive applications. The 5 year warranty on BLACK seems a better deal right now. RED is new and needs time to unravel its true nature. BLACK has 300,000 load/unload cycles while RED is rated at 1,000,000, but the BLACK drive draws a lot less power. I would go with BLACK's 5y warranty instead of RED's 3y warranty
Make sure you have enough cooling and you know the drive's temperature during heavy loads.
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Peroxyde - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
Cool thx. BTW, In the example above Black is not cheaper. It costs $100/TB while the Red is $140 for 2TB. I'll follow your advice, will buy the 1TB Black for now. Replyvgray35@hotmail.com - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
I have just read the SPCR review of RED drives, and these may well be a better choice all round over the BLACK drives, especially given the energy efficiency numbers, and the fact that 7200 rpm drives are not able to consistently outperform these 5400 rpm RED drives.Note that the 1T RED drive performance is quite a lot less than the 3TB drive, but is more energy efficient. The 3TB performance is good.
That RED 3y warranty is likely based on a NAS configuration (a harsher environment), which means a standalone drive is likely approaching a 5y warranty equivalent. I am beginning to change my mind on that BLACK drive purchase even with that 5y warranty.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/WD_Red Reply
Watwatwat - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
Of course they function like any other drive outside of nas.worrying too much about reliability misses the point, you should buy two because one will fail with your data, its just a given, you need backup. don't buy yourself a false sense of security. Reply
vgray35@hotmail.com - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
I agree. Use that 2nd hard drive to replace the 1st drive BEFORE the warranty runs out, regardless of whether the 1st drive still seems OK.When you buy higher reliability drives this is not false security, just good business. False security is when one fails to also use backups.
Using backups, and hope that cheap GREEN and BLUE drives will be mitigated is a false hope. Recover from a failure is invariably always a very expensive proposition.
Isn't buying two the point about satisfying that worry? Backups are always a pain, cost money and time, and are painful when you have to resort to using them. Changing drives early invariably affords less pain. Reply
SunLord - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
WD Red is un-gimped Raid friendly version of Green drive just like the RE drives are un-gimped raid friendly versions of Black drives. The only real differences between Red and Green is the firmwares they ship with having different settings the internals are all identical just like it is with Black and RE drives. I will admit the I've not taken apart a red drive but I have taken apart a Black and RE 1TB drives made with in 3 weeks of each other and they were 100% identical save for the stickers any Replyvgray35@hotmail.com - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
And yet experience under load yields a different result, despite the fact that they look the same inside. There is something else afoot here besides firmware. ReplyDzban - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
1. Any good recent 7200 RPM drive2.same
3.same but you could use "green" type drive if you would store
not frequentlyu used files like media Reply
vgray35@hotmail.com - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
The term "not frequently used drive" reveals nothing about usage. A single usage event could last for 30 minutes. Doing this once a day qualifies as not frequently used. However during that single event power dissipation could cause temperature to rise very high, and this extreme thermal cycling dramatically reduces hard drive life cycle. The low power drive causes peak temperature to be high due to inadequate cooling due to the drive's physical construction in part. So what does "low power and not so frequently used drive" really mean. Typically it means low quality, low reliability and dubious low power capability.Just focus on good quality drives from the start in all situations and spend the money to make life more simple. GREEN OR BLUE drives are just not worthwhile for any application. Open one up and take a look. BLACK is better so use it everywhere. RED appears to be better yet, so maybe we should use that one in every situation instead.
ECO drives are not worthwhile. Reply