WD Red Pro Review: 4 TB Drives for NAS Systems Benchmarked
by Ganesh T S on August 8, 2014 9:00 AM ESTConcluding Remarks
Ten different 4 TB hard drives have been analyzed for NAS and DAS applications. Coming to the business end of the review, it is clear that there is no 'one size fits all' model in this area. The hard drives themselves were launched targeting different markets and their resulting performance varies accordingly. However, based on our test results we can arrive at the following conclusions:
The lowest power consumption numbers were recorded, as expected, with the 5400/5900 RPM drives: the WD Reds, Seagate NAS HDDs and the Seagate Terascale units. While the WD Red drew the least power in the resync test, the Terascale and the NAS HDD drew less power during our access sequence tests (though not by much). If power constraints are a primary factor any one of the three would be a good choice. However with that said, despite possessing the highest workload rating of the three the Terascale has the lowest MTBF, coming in at a rating of 800K hours versus 1M hours for the Western Digital and Seagate NAS drives. Consequently depending on the usage scenario the extra premium for the Terascale might not be worth it.
The best overall performance is recorded by the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4, thanks to its clear lead in the random access patterns segment of the multi-client evaluation. The drawback being that the part is quite difficult to come across for purchase and carries a premium wherever it becomes available.
Meanwhile the Toshiba drive is a strong value proposition as the cheapest enterprise hard drive in the scalable storage class of drives. Even though the MSRP and street price put it in the same category as that of the Seagate Terascale, we have seen occasional deals which give it only a slight premium over the non-enterprise WD Red and the Seagate NAS HDDs. Otherwise the Ultrastar 7K4000 SAS unit is also available for rock bottom prices from third-party sellers on Amazon, and is a good candidate for users running SAS-based storage servers. Though without a broader sample space it is difficult to recommend it further.
Finally we have the WD Red Pro, which aims to strike a balance between performance, power consumption and price. The attractive pricing (given the warranty) makes up for the fact that it doesn't impress in any particular category compared to the competition. If Seagate's Enterprise Capacity drive were to retail for the same price as that of the Red Pro, the choice would be a no-brainer in favour of the Seagate unit. But right now that is not the case, and Western Digital continues to present a unique value proposition with the Red Pro lineup.
All in all, there are plenty of options for NAS users looking to stock up their NAS units with high capacity drives. Though not at the bleeding edge of capacity, today's 4TB drives offer a good mix of pricing, performance, and capacity; and for the cautious buyer 4TB drives offer an alternative to the potential risk in going the new technology route with 6 TB drives. In the end, with the right data in hand it's easy enough to find the best fit by taking into consideration the expected workload and desired price points.
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jabber - Friday, August 8, 2014 - link
So actually nothing important. When I see these NAS/Storage articles I just can't help with a lot of eye-rolling at what folks write. Folks spending large amounts of effort and money on data that is of little value to anyone or anything.I best most here would actually get by with a 2TB external USB3 HDD.if they were honest. Oh and that includes the business they work for.
jaden24 - Friday, August 8, 2014 - link
Well, what you are calling unimportant is a very subjective statement. To me, spending large amounts of time, effort and money is extremely worth it. Also, much of it has paid off over time since I have properly implemented good practices. This has allowed me to share a library of movies, tv shows and music with my family in 5 different rooms via XBMC because it is all centrally located.Having done all of that work to offer this content would be a total waste if I didn't take proper measures to ensure it is backed up. Surely, it wouldn't be smart to let an array fail and have to re-encode and format all of that data all over again; now that would take a lot of wasted time and effort.
Besides, a 2TB external HDD would have to be USB3 (possibly with UASP) and hooked to a USB3 controller to achieve decent, multiple streams, but it wouldn't have redundancy. Also, 2TB is only going to hold so many movies. What if you like 400-480p movies, but I prefer 720-1080p movies? All of this comes down to preference, and this alone is what determines each of our own setups to suit our tastes.
sapius1 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I am a professional photographer and generate about 1TB/year of original content (growing each year). I absolutely need more than a 2TB external HDD.m2inor - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
It's very easy to legitimately consume more than 200GB on any computer let alone a server:- I believe in having multiple copies of personal docs and media I created: photos, personal videos, emails, installers, projects, etc
- if you have multiple desktops and laptops, each should be backed up
- and don't forget to backup the backup devices :-)
Do that for 30 years, and you'll have quite a collection. Only the inciminating evidence should be deleted on a regular basis.
Oh, and you'll only need that one file a few days after you delete it.
dcaxax - Friday, August 8, 2014 - link
When comparing NAS drives, reliability is by far the #1 concern. Power consumption and noise are also important, but by no means the deciding factor.Testing the WD Red drives (especially given the pretty high failure rates of the plain WD Reds) without saying something about reliability makes the whole article pointless.
IF the drives are reliable, people will chose them over faster, chepaer and probablyn even noisier drivers. If you're going to to do this you needs to test at least 10-20 drives and come up with some kind of torture test to really push them.
jaden24 - Friday, August 8, 2014 - link
This is exactly why I only buy hard drives with 5yr warranties. The length of a warranty tells you a lot about the confidence of a manufacture in their product. When bad luck does arise, (usually around the 3-5yr range), you have a drive that gets replaced with no questions asked. At least that is my experience with WD.cen - Friday, August 8, 2014 - link
Too bad HGST couldn't send the deskstar version.. I bought 4 of them a month ago for my FreeNAS build, excellent drives.bsd228 - Friday, August 8, 2014 - link
Ganesh - can you put some questions out to the manufacturers and write a short article on the relevance of URE? I find it very hard to take this metric seriously when consumer drives are all marked as 'better than 1 in 10^14,' a nice round number that hasn't changed in a decade (forever?). Has there really been no improvement? Are they all really the same? And are enterprise drives precisely 10x better? Unlikely. And what is really different about them?shodanshok - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Hi,We recently discussed the URE thing on the Linux raid mailing list. You can found more info here: http://marc.info/?l=linux-raid&m=1406791003244...
asmian - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
1 post is not a "discussion". And while this may be relevant for Linux users, it doesn't help anyone else, perhaps running RAID on Windows or using a NAS, for which some at least of these drives are marketed.In the last discussion on this here, there was mention that ZFS (at least with double parity) can avoid UREs affecting array rebuilds. However, it looks as if Storage Spaces and the new ReFS file system now in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server can achieve the same thing as ZFS with much lower system resources (although it is necessary to bypass the Storage Spaces UI on Windows 8.1 for proper configuration). Can anyone share any experience of using ReFS, since this is quite new and directly challenges the Nas4Free/FreeNas route which requires FreeBSD as an OS? In particular, it makes a single media storage server/HTPC combo a feasible proposition, which might be very useful for many...