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 ESTMulti-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).
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.
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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.