6 TB NAS Drives: WD Red, Seagate Enterprise Capacity and HGST Ultrastar He6 Face-Off

Multi-Client Access - NAS Environment

We put the NAS drives in the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP through some IOMeter tests with a CIFS share being accessed from up to 25 VMs simultaneously. The following four graphs show the total available bandwidth and the average response time while being subject to different types of workloads through IOMeter. IOMeter also reports various other metrics of interest such as maximum response time, read and write IOPS, separate read and write bandwidth figures etc. Some of the interesting aspects from our IOMeter benchmarking run can be found here (WD Red 6TB), here (HGST Ultrastar He6) and here (Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 6 TB).

Western Digital Red 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - 100% Sequential ReadsSeagate Enterprise Capacity 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - 100% Sequential ReadsHGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - 100% Sequential Reads

Western Digital Red 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Max Throughput - 50% ReadsSeagate Enterprise Capacity 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Max Throughput - 50% ReadsHGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Max Throughput - 50% Reads

Western Digital Red 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Random 8K - 70% ReadsSeagate Enterprise Capacity 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Random 8K - 70% ReadsHGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Random 8K - 70% Reads

Western Digital Red 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Real Life - 65% ReadsSeagate Enterprise Capacity 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Real Life - 65% ReadsHGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB - 3 HDDs / RAID-5 / 2x 1G - Real Life - 65% Reads

These tests reveal the shortcoming of the low rotational speeds of the WD Red. Random accesses from multiple clients can cause the performance to drop considerably, while the Seagate enterprise drive manages to hold its own. However, the good aspect is that the WD Red's target market (SOHO / home consumers) will not have these many concurrent accesses. The type of workload is also expected to be mostly sequential in nature. For those test cases, the Red 6 TB version manages to perform as expected.