6 TB NAS Drives: WD Red, Seagate Enterprise Capacity and HGST Ultrastar He6 Face-Off
by Ganesh T S on July 21, 2014 11:00 AM ESTSingle Client Access - DAS and NAS Environments
The drives under test were connected to a 6 Gbps SATA port off the PCH in our DAS testbed. After formatting in NTFS, they were subject to our DAS test suite. The results are presented in the table below.
| 6 TB NAS Drives Face-Off: DAS Benchmarks (MBps) | ||||||
| WD Red 6 TB | Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 | HGST Ultrastar He6 | ||||
| Read | Write | Read | Write | Read | Write | |
| Photos | 137.3 | 141.45 | 146.36 | 193.52 | 146.72 | 102.54 |
| Videos | 138.11 | 137.25 | 185.94 | 207.34 | 149.71 | 104.74 |
| Blu-ray Folder | 136.1 | 140.22 | 185.12 | 215.47 | 149.81 | 107.03 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Light) | 2.54 | 237.28 | 7.22 | 225.41 | 5.9 | 248.37 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) | 3.32 | 250.14 | 9.68 | 210.47 | 8.03 | 235.11 |
| Adobe After Effects | 2.27 | 96.75 | 7.27 | 49.66 | 5.98 | 17.05 |
| Adobe Illustrator | 2.36 | 101.77 | 7.11 | 163.16 | 5.9 | 71.59 |
On the NAS environment side, we configured three drives in RAID-5 in the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP unit. Two of the network links were bonded (configured with 802.3ad LACP). Our usual Intel NASPT / robocopy benchmarks were processed from a virtual machine in our NAS testbed. The results are presented in the graph below.
The results above indicate that when it comes to a networked environment, the lower rotational speeds of the WD Red 6 TB are not much of an issue for single client accesses. It manages to acquit itself well in most of the test cases. Write-intensive workloads do cause the performance to drop a bit. Between the HGST Ultrastar He6 and the Seagate Enterprise Capacity, there is not much to help differentiate in this particular evaluation routine.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
83 Comments
View All Comments
JohnMD1022 - Thursday, July 24, 2014 - link
Actually, yes.I have seen too many bad Seagate drives to use or recommend.
At one point, I had 9 bad Seagates in my shop at the same time.
In addition, their customer service leaves a lot to be desired.
comomolo - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Have you actually read the article?It's clearly written that the drive DID NOT fail. The drive in question passed all the tests and ran perfectly fine by itself on a PC. The author states this looks like a compatibility issue with QNAP's server.
GTVic - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
A lot of people claim the failure is related to shipping methods, particularly blaming Newegg on this. Proper shipping = reliable drive. I'd believe that sooner than "WD Red sucks" comments.Wixman666 - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I have a sea of WD Red hard drives out in the field at various customer locations. I've only ever had one fail.romrunning - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I don't understand - if you had both WD Red and WD Red Pro drives (according to your other quick note on these new drive models), why didn't you review the WD Red Pro?ganeshts - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
As I wrote in the pipeline section, the WD Red Pro review will come next week.This is for the 6 TB capacity.
The 4TB versions' review will include the WD Red Pro (sometime next week)
continuum - Saturday, July 26, 2014 - link
http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/36...Claims there's an early model issue on the regular WD Red's causing them to be invalid? But that's the only site I've heard of claiming this...
Rythan - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I've gone through this article a couple of times - where are the idle and load power numbers?ganeshts - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I will add them later tonight (along with the missing He6 benchmark numbers).romrunning - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Ah... It just seems that some of your numbers in this face-off would change if the WD drive was 7200rpm instead of 5400rpm. Perhaps that would affect your conclusion as well. But I suppose if you didn't get a 6TB WD Red Pro drive, then it's a moot point.