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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joelypolly - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
With a difference of 1 to 2 watts for the Seagate I fail to see how that would be too much of a cause for concern for cooling systems? Even with a 5 disk array it should still be under 10 watts difference in the most demanding circumstances and about 5 watts on average.owan - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
I was thinking about that. 1W difference has got to be negligible for any desktop based system. Even 3-4W differences, while large on the relative scale, are small in the absolute sense. I don't see how you could make the statement "if you want more performance, Seagate, if you need cool and quiet, WD" Is there no other reason to pick one drive over the other besides a 1W performance consumption difference?glugglug - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
It is hard to see the relative differences quickly switching between the performance graphs for the different drives because some of them are on different scales for each drive. Is there any way the graph scales can be made uniform?ganeshts - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Can you let me know the specific graphs you are seeing the problem in? The numbers are also reported by HD Tune Pro on the side..glugglug - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
The random read and random write graphs.I can see the scale on the side, but for example the random read graph has the max Y scale value at 50ms for the WD SE drive, 100ms for the Red drive and WD RE and 200 ms for the Seagate. At first glance, it looks like the Seagate is owning because of the scale -- it requires extra thought to figure out what the graph would look like on the same scale for comparison.
ganeshts - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Got it. From what I remember, HD Tune Pro doesn't give user control over graph scales. But, I will see what can be done for future articles.ZRohlfs - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
If you look closely at those graphs you can see some outliers that are very high on the graph. They are away from the statistical clump but they cause the graph to have the scales that they do.carlwu - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Can anyone comment on Seagate reliability as of late? Their 1TB drive fiasco left a bad taste my mouth.dawza - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
The Seagate NAS HDDs seem quite good in terms of reliability thus far. I have a 3 TB and 4 TB in my WHS (JBOD) and they've made it past the crucial 1 month mark without issues. But as mentioned in the review, these haven't been on the market very long.These are the first Seagates I've purchased in years due to past issues you alluded to.
RealBeast - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
Carlwu, I had that thought also but set up one NAS with 8 x 3TB Seagate 7200rpm (the ST3000DM001) in RAID 6 and have had no issues for the six months they have run 24/7. Fingers crossed.