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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zlandar - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Would really like a comparison in a RAID-5 setup with 4 drives since that's what I use for media storage.Tell Seagate to send you 3 more drives!
otherwise - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Does anyone know how read patrolling factors into usage numbers? There is no way I would come even close to 150 TB/yr in a home NAS with my own data, but with ZFS read patrolling going on in the background I don't exactly know what the true load is.bobbozzo - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
I don't really understand these read or read/write ratings... iirc, Google's data said reads and writes do not affect failure rate on hard drives. (SSD's are obviously a different story, for writes).htspecialist - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
I have had good experience with Hitachi drives in NAS use. HGST has both consumer class and enterprise class 7200 rpm 4tb drives capable of NAS use. Any plans to include the HGST in the review evaluation of 4tb NAS capable drives?wintermute000 - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
yah I've had several WD and Seagate failures over the last 6-7 years of running 4 drives in a RAID5 but no Hitachi failures, running all hitachi nowiwod - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
To me, Speed doesn't matter any more. Not for NAS Market. Since even the slowest HDD will saturate 1Gbits Ethernet in Sequential Read Write, and Random Read Write are slow as well as mostly limited by the NAS CPU as well.I want Price and Disk Size. Reliability is also a concern as well but since most HDD will just fail in one way or another over time It is best to have something like Synology where you over a number of disk you could have up to 2 HDD failure.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Are the idle power numbers in the chart correct?It looks like the decimal point was pushed to right...
KAlmquist - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
The power numbers are wall power, so it includes power supply losses and the power consumed by the LenovoEMC PX2-300D, in addition to the power consumed by the hard drive. So the absolute values aren't useful (unless you own a PX2-300D), but the numbers do show which drives consume less power.mcfaul - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
seconded, i have 32 x 3tb drives.. the heat adds up....mcfaul - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
"We have also been very impressed with WD's response to various user complaints about the first generation Red drives."Can you expand on what the complaints were, and what WD have done about them? I've only heard good things about the Red drives