Battle of the 4 TB NAS Drives: WD Red and Seagate NAS HDD Face-Off
by Ganesh T S on September 4, 2013 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Seagate
- HDDs
- Western Digital
- Enterprise
Miscellaneous Factors & Final Words
Power consumption measurement was done by running our standard IOMeter disk performance bench on a CIFS share in the LenovoEMC PX2-300D (single disk in a JBOD configuration). The following table summarizes the power consumption of the NAS unit at the wall under various operating modes.
| 4 TB NAS Hard Drive Face-Off: LenovoEMC PX2-300D Power Consumption | ||||
| Mode | WD Red | Seagate NAS HDD | WD Se | WD Re |
| Idle | 18.25 W | 19.29 W | 22.67 W | 23.68 W |
| Max. Throughput (100% Reads) | 19.51 W | 20.56 W | 23.54 W | 24.53 W |
| Real Life (60% Random, 65% Reads) | 19.58 W | 20.60 W | 23.95 W | 24.49 W |
| Max. Throughput (50% Reads) | 19.67 W | 20.63 W | 24.11 W | 24.41 W |
| Random 8 KB (70% Reads) | 19.07 W | 20.98 W | 23.54 W | 23.68 W |
The above numbers suggest that the WD Red is the most power-efficient of all the considered models. This was definitely on the cards once it was determined that the WD Red operates at 5400 rpm while the Seagate NAS HDD operates at 5900 rpm. Disks running at 7200 rpm have a significant power penalty.
Concluding Remarks
Coming to the business end of the review, one must note that both Western Digital and Seagate have put forward convincing offerings for the 1-5 bay NAS market. While the Seagate unit manages to win most of the performance tests, it comes at the cost of an increase in power consumption. 1-5 bay NAS system users looking for top performance at lower price points might do well to take a look at the Seagate NAS HDD. On the other hand, if a cool-running system is the need of the hour and performance is not a major concern, the WD Red makes an excellent choice. We have also been very impressed with WD's response to various user complaints about the first generation Red drives. Seagate's track record with the NAS HDD is pretty small since the drives started shipping just a couple of months ago. As the drives get more widespread, compatibility issues (if any) get resolved and more user field reports become public.
Sometimes, the expected workloads become too heavy (> 150 TB/yr) for the consumer NAS drives to handle. Under those circumstances, the WD Se and WD Re are excellent choices. The WD Se can handle up to 180 TB/yr and the WD Re can go up to 550 TB/yr. Thanks to their higher rotational speed (7200 rpm), the enterprise grade drives have much better performance on the whole. We have also been using the WD Re drives for evaluation of various NAS systems. The disks have gone through countless rebuilds for test purposes and are still going strong. We have no qualms in standing behind the WD Re drives for very heavy NAS workloads.
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Gigaplex - Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - link
Avoid Storage Spaces from Windows. It's an unproven and slow "re-imagination" of RAID as Microsoft likes to call it. The main selling point is flexibility of adding more drives, but that feature doesn't work as advertised because it doesn't rebalance. If you avoid adding more drives over time it has no benefits over conventional RAID, is far slower, and has had far less real world testing on it.Bob Todd - Monday, September 9, 2013 - link
For home use I've gone from RAID 5 to pooling + snapshot parity (DriveBender and SnapRAID respectively). It's still one big ass pool so it's easy to manage, I can survive two disks failing simultaneously with no data loss, and even in the event of a disaster where 3+ fail simultaneously I'll only lose whatever data was on the individual disks that croaked. Storage Spaces was nice in theory, but the write speed for the parity spaces is _horrendous_, and it's still striped so I'd risk losing everything (not to mention expansion in multiples of your column size is a bitch for home use).coolviper777 - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
If you have a good hardware raid card, with BBU and memory, and decent drives, then I think Raid 5 works just fine for home use.I currently have a Raid 5 array using a 3Ware 9560SE Raid card, consisting of 4 x 1.5TB WD Black drives. This card has battery backup and onboard memory. My RAID 5 array works beautifully for my home use. I ran into an issue with a drive going bad. I was able to get a replacement, and the rebuild worked well. There's an automatic volume scan once a week, and I've seen it fix a few error quite a while ago. But nothing very recent.
I get tremendous speed out of my Raid5, and even boot my Windows7 OS from a partition on the Raid 5. Probably, eventually move that to a SSD, but they're still expensive for the size I need for the C: drive.
My biggest problem with Raid1 is that it's hugely wasteful in terms of disk space, and it can be slower than just a single drive. I can understand for mission critical stuff, Raid5 might give issues. However, for home use, if you combine true hardware Raid5 with backup of important files, I think it's a great solution in terms of reliability and performance.
tjoynt - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
++ this. At work we *always* use raid-6: nowadays single drive redundancy is a disaster just waiting to happen.brshoemak - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
"First off, error checking should in general be done by the RAID system, not by the drive electronic."The "should in general" port is where the crux of the issue lies. A RAID controller SHOULD takeover the error-correcting functions if the drive itself is having a problem - but it doesn't do it exclusively, it lets the drives have a first go at it. A non-ERC/TLER/CCTL drive will keep working on the problem for too long and not pass the reigns to the RAID controller as it should.
Also, RAID1 is the most basic RAID level in terms of complexity and I wouldn't have any qualms about running consumer drives in a consumer setting - as long as I had backups. But deal with any RAID level beyond RAID1 (RAID10/6), especially those that require parity data, and you could be in for a world of hurt if you use consumer drives.
Egg - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
No. Hard drives have, for a very very long time, included their own error checking and correcting codes, to deal with small errors. Ever heard of bad blocks?RAID 1 exists to deal more with catastrophic failures of entire drives.
tjoynt - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
RAID systems can't do error checking at that level because they don't have access to it: only the drive electronics do.The problems with recovering RAID arrays don't usually show up with RAID-1 arrays, but with RAID-5 arrays, because you have a LOT more drives to read.
I swore off consumer level raid-5 when my personal raid-5 (on an Intel Matrix RAID-5 :P) dropped two drives and refused to rebuild with them even though they were still perfectly functional.
Rick83 - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
Just fix it by hand - it's not that difficult. Of course, with pseudo hardware RAID, you're buggered, as getting the required access to the disk, and forcing partial rebuilds isn't easily possible.I've had a second disk drop out on me once, and I don't recall how exactly I ended up fixing it, but it was definitely possible. I probably just let the drive "repair" the unreadable sectors by writing 512 rubbish bytes to the relevant locations, and tanked the loss of those few bytes, then rebuilt to the redundancy disk.
So yeah, there probably was some data loss, but bad sectors aren't the end of the world.
And by using surface scans you can make the RAID drop drives with bad sectors at the first sign of an issue, then resync and be done with it. 3-6 drive RAID 5 is perfectly okay, if you only have intermediate availability requirements. For high availability RAID 6/RAID 10 arrays with 6-12 disks are a better choice.
mooninite - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
Intel chipsets do not offer hardware RAID. The RAID you see is purely software. The Intel BIOS just formats your hard drive with Intel's IMSM (Intel Matrix Storage Manager) format. The operating system has to interpret the format and do all the RAID parity/stripe calculations. Consider it like a file system.Calling Intel's RAID "hardware" or "pseudo-hardware" is a misconception I'd like to see die. :)
mcfaul - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
"First off, error checking should in general be done by the RAID system, not by the drive electronic. "You need to keep in mind how drives work. they are split into 512b/4k sectors... and each sector has a significant chunk of ECC at the end of the sector, so all drives are continually doing both error checking and error recovery on every single read they do.
plus, if it is possible to quickly recover an error, then obviously it is advantageous for the drive to do this, as there may not be a second copy of the data available (i.e. when rebuilding a RAID 1 or RAID 5 array)