6 TB NAS Drives: WD Red, Seagate Enterprise Capacity and HGST Ultrastar He6 Face-Off
by Ganesh T S on July 21, 2014 11:00 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Final Words
In the process of reviewing the Western Digital Red 6 TB drives, we did face one hiccup. Our QNAP testbed NAS finished resyncing a RAID-5 volume with three of those drives, but suddenly indicated an I/O error for one of them.
We were a bit surprised (in all our experience with hard drive review units, we had never had one fail that quickly). To check into the issue, we ran the SMART diagnostics and also a short test from within the NAS UI. Even though both of them passed clean, the NAS still refused to accept the disk for inclusion in the RAID volume. Fortunately, we had a spare drive that we could use to rebuild the volume. Putting the 'failed' drive in a PC didn't reveal any problems either. We are chalking this down to compatibility issues, though it is strange that the rebuilt volume with the same disks completed benchmarking without any problems. In any case, I would advise prospective consumers to ensure that their NAS is in the compatibility list for the drive before moving forward with the purchase.
RAID Resync and Power Consumption
The other aspect of interest when it comes to hard drives and NAS units is the RAID rebuild / resync times and the associated power consumption numbers. The following table presents the relevant values for the resyncing of a RAID-5 volume involving the respective drives.
| QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP RAID-5 Volume Resync | ||||
| Disk Model | Duration | Avg. Power | ||
| Western Digital Red 6 TB | 14h 27m 52s | 90.48 W | ||
| Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5" HDD v4 6 TB | 10h 24m 22s | 105.42 W | ||
| HGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB | 12h 34m 20s | 95.36 W | ||
Update: We also have some power consumption numbers under different scenarios. In each of these cases, we have three of the drives under consideration configured in a RAID-5 volume in the NAS. The access mode is exercised by running the corresponding IOMeter trace from 25 clients simultaneously.
| QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP RAID-5 Power Consumption | |||
| Workload | WD Red 6 TB | Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5" HDD v4 6 TB | HGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB |
| Idle | 79.34 W | 87.16 W | 84.98 W |
|
Max. Throughput (100% Reads) |
93.90 W | 107.22 W | 97.58 W |
|
Real Life (60% Random, 65% Reads) |
84.04 W | 109.25 W | 94.03 W |
|
Max. Throughput (50% Reads) |
96.74 W | 112.82 W | 99.25 W |
|
Random 8 KB (70% Reads) |
85.22 W | 105.65 W | 91.47 W |
As expected, the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5" HDD v4 consumes the most power, while the He6 is much better off thanks to its HelioSeal technology while retaining the same rotational speed. The WD Red, on the other hand, wins the power efficiency battle as expected - a good thing for home consumers who value that over pure performance.
Concluding Remarks
We have taken a look at three different 6 TB drives, but it is hard to recommend any particular one as the clear cut choice unless the particular application is known. The interesting aspect here is that none of the three drives have overlapping use-cases. For home consumers who are interested in stashing their media collection / smartphone-captured photos and videos and expect only four or five clients to simultaneously access the NAS, the lower power consumption as well as the price of the WD Red 6 TB is hard to ignore. For users looking for absolute performance and those who need multiple iSCSI LUNs for virtual machines and other such applications would find the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 6 TB a good choice. The HGST Ultrastar He6 is based on upcoming technological advancements, and hence, carries a premium. However, the TCO aspect turns out to be in its favour, particularly when multiple drives running 24x7 are needed. It offers the best balance of power consumption, price and performance.
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Wixman666 - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
The WD Green and other drives fail more often because they are not intended for NAS use. They lack the anti-vibration mechanism, so they shake apart.anandtech_user01 - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Given my own previous experiences, I wouldn't trust high density 3.5" drives from any manufacturer period. Of course, lots of other people do (or somehow feel forced to). As for WD RED, they can be better than the competition in respect to being able to switch off the head-parking every 10 seconds (with wdidle3.exe DOS utility). Wheras I've got 2 Seagate Momentus 7200.2/4 and that's impossible with them. Looking at the specs for the 2.5" RED it's pretty much just a re-branded WD Black from the previous year. And those ones have been out for a few years, and are reliable / do have a good reputation. Wheras I've heard that the 3.5" RED something more like a re-worked / tweaked 3.5" WD Green. Not so sure about those ones.kmi187 - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Anecdotal evidence, while it should not be discarded, is rather irrelevant since the scale is rather low. Now if you look at some statistics from data-centers it shows seagate as a clear winner when it come to failure rates. In other words, they aren't doing too well.This data is much more reliable since it's data from a lot of hard drives, so it paints a much clearer picture.
I build custom pc's for a computer store and it's just not fun when you have kickass system that went out the door and 2 months later you have to tell the client, yeah sorry man but the drive died, we are going to have to reinstall your pc. If that starts to happen on regular basis, you know you have to look for alternatives.
romrunning - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Why wouldn't you build w/SSDs as your base drive, and only use spinning disks as secondary storage? It would seem that you would have better reliability that way.asmian - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Agree! It clearly isn't a "kickass" custom system if there's no SSD as boot drive. I pity these customers if they are being sold something as "special" without that as a basic building block these days. :( Please tell us where you work so we can avoid your store.erple2 - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Because managing two disks is a total waste of time and resources. If you're already going to a shop to have a machine built for you, then you've realized that your time is worth more to you than the inconvenience or rolling your own machine. Therefore, it stands to reason that you would also not want to be bothered with having to juggle installations to ssd vs. HDD. I have a setup like that in a laptop, and I hate having to figure out what applications I should put on the ssd vs the HDD. Just give me something that works. That and my time is worth far more than the cost spent trying to juggle applications on and off the ssd when it fills up.That having been said, ssd is pretty cheap now, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't put in a 500 gb to 1 tb ssd in a higher end build.
Samus - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I actually haven't had a drive from Seagate, WD or Hitachi fail in years. The last one was a 7200.10 1.5TB (~2008)I have more WD Red's in deployment than any other drive and they've all been great. However, the largest capacity I've rolled out are 2TB models.
iLovefloss - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Their older Barracuda drivers sure did.http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-dri...
Of course, they gotten better.
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/920-6/disques-durs...
Still, no matter how you look at it, those "Green" drives tend to fail more often than their other counterparts.
cm2187 - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Same here. A bunch of 4TB Red and never managed to make them work in a hardware RAID array (LSI and Adaptec). Same symptoms as in the article. Drive marked as failed in the array but works well as standalone. Still had some problems though much less in a soft array (synology). Hitachi desktop drives behave much better in a hardware RAID.LoneWolf15 - Friday, July 25, 2014 - link
I've been running Reds (mix of 2TB and 3TB, as I'm slowly migrating capacity) in an HP SmartArray P222 in an HP Microserver Gen8 for some time now. 6TB RAID-5 array and no failures.I will admit, I haven't tried the 4TB models for RAID, but do have one in a USB3 MacAlly external enclosure for backing up the box (Server 2012R2 Standard).