WD Red Pro 6 TB Review - High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump

Single Client Access - DAS Benchmarks

The WD Red Pro was connected to a 6 Gbps SATA port off the PCH in our DAS testbed. After formatting in NTFS, it was subject to our DAS test suite. While processing our DAS suite, we also recorded the instantaneous transfer rates and temperature of the drive. Compared to other NAS drives at the same capacity point, write transfers show higher instantaneous speeds due to a combination of the firmware and the 128 MB cache inside the disk. However, sustained write rates are comparable to other 6TB drives. The temperature of the unit at the end of the transfers, despite being blow 45C, is higher than any of the other drives at the same capacity point.

The graphs below present the average transfer rates for the various workloads and how they compare against other HDDs of the same capacity that have been evaluated before.

PCMark 8 Storage Traces

In the real-life workloads, the caching behavior enables the WD Red Pro to score better than the competitors in almost all the write tests. Read scenarios show it coming in the middle of the pack.