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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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