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
Specifications and Feature Set Comparison
Prior to getting into the performance evaluation, we will take a look at the specifications of the WD Red Pro 6 TB and see how it compares against the other NAS-specific hard drives that we have looked at before.
The WD Red Pro 6 TB sports a SATA III (6 Gbps) interface. As is customary for the high capacity drives in this market segment, it can only emulate 512-byte sectors (natively 4K). The interesting aspect is the presence of a 128 MB cache similar to the Seagate and HGST drives, and unlike the WD Red. The obvious selling point for its price target is the 7200 RPM speed, which should easily give it the lead in most benchmarks over the WD Red. The other aspects (such as the URE ratings, MTBF, warranty etc.) are as expected for a drive targeting SMBs and SMEs. The table below presents the data for the drive against the others in our evaluation database.
| Comparative HDD Specifications | ||
| Aspect | ||
| Model Number | WD6001FFWX | WD6001FFWX |
| Interface | SATA 6 Gbps | SATA 6 Gbps |
| Sector Size / AF | 512E | 512E |
| Rotational Speed | 7200 RPM | 7200 RPM |
| Cache | 128 MB | 128 MB |
| Rated Load / Unload Cycles | 600 K | 600 K |
| Non-Recoverable Read Errors / Bits Read | < 1 in 1014 | < 1 in 1014 |
| MTBF | 1 M | 1 M |
| Rated Workload | ~ 180 TB/yr | ~ 180 TB/yr |
| Operating Temperature Range | 5 to 60 C | 5 to 60 C |
| Acoustics (Seek Average - dBA) | 34 dBA | 34 dBA |
| Physical Parameters | 14.7 x 10.16 x 2.61 cm; 750 g | 14.7 x 10.16 x 2.61 cm; 750 g |
| Warranty | 5 years | 5 years |
| Price (in USD, as-on-date) | $299 | $299 |
A high level overview of the various supported SATA features is provided by HD Tune Pro.
We get a better idea of the supported features using FinalWire's AIDA64 system report. The table below summarizes the extra information generated by AIDA64 (that is not already provided by HD Tune Pro).
| Comparative HDD Features | ||
| Aspect | ||
| DMA Setup Auto-Activate | Supported; Disabled | Supported; Disabled |
| Extended Power Conditions | Supported; Disabled | Supported; Disabled |
| Free-Fall Control | Not Supported | Not Supported |
| General Purpose Logging | Supported; Enabled | Supported; Enabled |
| In-Order Data Delivery | Not Supported | Not Supported |
| NCQ Priority Information | Supported | Supported |
| Phy Event Counters | Supported | Supported |
| Release Interrupt | Not Supported | Not Supported |
| Sense Data Reporting | Not Supported | Not Supported |
| Software Settings Preservation | Supported; Enabled | Supported; Enabled |
| Streaming | Not Supported | Not Supported |
| Tagged Command Queuing | Not Supported | Not Supported |
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DanNeely - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Except for upper end enterprise it's still probably too early to add 10gbe to a nas test suite.A few years back I remember reading that there was a process threshold that a lot of people were expecting to dramatically drive down the high power cost of sending a 10gb signal over twisted pair connections. Unfortunately I don't remember if it was 14nm; in which case we should start to see lower power hardware within a year or 10 nm; in which case we'll probably end up waiting until closer to 2020 before getting in in our boxes.
Hannibal80 - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
Yes, that's absolutely true, my nas waste same power on the 10gbe adapter and on cpu and that's crazy. Still, with HD and then 4k videos, raw pics near or over 50MB each, old good hdd disks which continue to improve, 1gbe is going to be too limiting...2020 is really far away! ☺
Jaybus - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
We could well see copper Ethernet being replaced by then. IBM just announced in May a 100 Gb/s transceiver using the first fully integrated wavelength multiplexed chip. The optical components are on-chip along side the electronic components. This integration is what will bring the price of optical Ethernet down to parity with copper. It will be a huge bump in bandwidth and power reduction. It is telling that the 100G consortium is already increasing the max distance to 1 km.Sivar - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
I've been using the Western Digital's NAS with these drives, WD EX2100, since April. Very solid unit. Really easy to set up, and includes advanced features when needed such as link aggregation.lundgsi2@yahoo.co.uk - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
thats great can't wait to get my hands on thesewww.hardwarecomputerstore.co.uk
ex_User - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
I believe you have an error in specs. "Non-Recoverable Read Errors / Bits Read" for Red Pro is "<10 in 10^15", not 10^14.http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/EN...
asmian - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
No, they are right - 10 in 10^15 is exactly the same as 1 in 10^14. It's written/marketed that way to confuse and look much better than it really is.Using a less than sign doesn't really change the base order of magnitude - eg. 9 in 10^15 would be consistent with their PDF table claim and it is still almost 10 times worse than any enterprise drive at 1 in 10^15 URE, which is why non-enterprise are not worth buying at these fail-likely sizes if you value your data.
ex_User - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Well, that misleading marketing works very well on laymen like me -- only after your post have I noticed the <1/<10 trick.leexgx - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
i agree that <1/<10 is Very misleading, so they have reduced or not added more error correction on these drivesleexgx - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
but if you getting unrecoverable read errors at that point you should replace the HDD as there is a problem with the drive, like i need to replace my segate {as the theme goes with seagate drives} as its slowly developing reallocated sectors, surprisingly its still working fine