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
Performance - Networked Environment
LenovoEMC's PX2-300D (based on the Intel Atom D525) was used as the testbed for evaluating the performance of the drives in a NAS enclosure. The PX2-300D is a 2-bay NAS unit. Only JBOD, RAID-0 and RAID-1 configurations are possible. Due to the lack of multiple samples of the Seagate NAS HDD, we restricted ourselves to evaluating a single disk configuration (JBOD) over the network A CIFS share was set up on the NAS and mapped on a Windows 7 VM. Intel NASPT / robocopy as well as IOMeter traces were run on this CIFS share.
Intel NASPT / robocopy
As expected, the WD Re takes the lead in many of the benchmarks. However, the Seagate NAS HDD is no slouch, and actually manages to hold its own in most of them (in fact, the read performance is pretty decent in this configuration).
IOMeter
IOMeter provides even more interesting results. The Seagate NAS HDD actually surpasses the WD Red in three of the four benchmark runs. That said, performance is only half the story in the 1-5 bay NAS market. Power consumption is also a very important metric. How much of a penalty do we have for the increased performance? The next section provides us some answers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
54 Comments
View All Comments
Wwhat - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Doing a 'torture test' means you use them a lot constantly though, not that you put them on a burner to see what happens.And frankly a drive should adhere to its stated lifetime/performance somewhat regardless how heavy you use it.
And don't forget that all drives unless powered down spin constantly anyway.
And quite a few NAS boxes for the home have so-so cooling, so it would be valid to test how hot HD's get during intensive (but normal) use.
chubbypanda - Thursday, September 26, 2013 - link
Ganesh, rated reliability for WD Se is also 1 per 10E15 (see http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/EN... ), same as Re.Oller - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link
I am planning to buy a Drobo 5N as a Plex video server and also for TimeMachine backup. That would seem to require limited data transfer.From the review it would seem that the Red is just as good as the RE and at nearly half the price would be the better choice.
Do you agree that the Red is a better choice than the RE for my needs?
chrcoluk - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Some bait and switching going on.I own 4 WD red's all 3TB versions.
First 2 purchased 2 years ago, they report NCQ supported, 4k sectors, security mode, and have no drive parking.
Brought 2 more yesterday. Dont support NCQ (wtf?), drive parking same as green drives, one is bigger than the other has a few extra LBA blocks and reports an extra gig size and 512byte sectors instead of 4k.
Totally bizzare.