WD Red Pro 6 TB Review - High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump
by Ganesh T S on September 7, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Storage
- HDDs
- Western Digital
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.
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Samus - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
At the current rate, it'll be only a few years before NAND hits parity with magnetic storage in capacity and price.3D (verticle) NAND and Intel's 3D X-Point are going to revolutionize storage as we know it.
X-Point will slowly make NAND a cheap commodity for the consumer sector (abandoned by the enterprise sector for X-Point) and NAND will be so cheap to produce by that point (it's 30 year old technology) that it'll be the common medium. It has already killed virtually every other form of portable storage (floppy disks, tapes, CD/DVD/Bluray, etc) with the only worthy exception being large capacity (2-4TB) 2.5" portable hard disks. It's only a matter of time before 4TB SSD's cost nearly the same as 4TB hard disks, and hard disk platter density is already hit some physical barriers, hence the need for shingled recording and other reliability/performance sacrifices.
But even then, soon,
Souka - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
SSDs aren't for NAS due to pricingIf you put a SSD in, many of the charts would be unreadable due to scaling issues.
Also, if the NAS is used for large number of writes, the SSD reliability would be a factor
melgross - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
Reliability would not be a factor. Large financial institutions are using them for transaction processing, and few things require more write reliability than that.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
The advantage of SSD is, according to legend at least, a more consistent life time: just retire them at x% of warranty, less infant mortality and random death (getting run over by a bus, in human terms).MrSpadge - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
The strong DAS performance bodes well for the new 6 TB Black model, which is probably physically similar but with different firmware settings.Wwhat - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
Why is the article listing the WD red pro with the addition 'star NAS'? Since when is WD using the 'star' term? I can't imagine them doing so, and especially see a company market something with 'red star' these days :)A quick web search shows only anadtech adds 'star' the the name.
Morawka - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
disappointing performance. basically every other nas drive on the market is faster than these. HGST and Seagate dominating.star-affinity - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
According to the benchmarks in this article – as a DAS drive the WD Red Pro seems nice – but it for some reason seems not as good when used as a NAS drive, agreed on that.Arbie - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
We want eight and we won't wait.Gigaplex - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
Colour me disappointed that there is no analysis of acoustic behaviour. My NAS is by far the loudest device in my room due to the 4 WD Red (non pro) drives in it, and they're supposed to be one of the quietest drives available.