Western Digital Red Review: Are NAS-optimized HDDs Worth the Premium?
by Ganesh T S on August 17, 2012 4:20 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Western Digital
- NAS
Introduction and Testbed Setup
Western Digital (WD) introduced hard drives specifically targeted towards NAS systems under the Red branding last month. Jason had some initial coverage at launch time. WD claimed to have put in a number of firmware features and some additional hardware aspects in the Red lineup to make it suitable for NAS usage.
WD touted the following main points
- Less aggressive head parking (no IntelliPark feature)
- Configurable Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), with a default of 7 seconds
- IntelliPower disk rotation speeds (comparable to Green drives)
- Vibration reduction mechanism in hardware
- 3-Yr. warranty and 24x7 phone support
In the next section, we will analyze each of these claims in detail. First, let us take a look at the testbeds. We used the WD Red drives standalone in a PC and also as part of a few SMB / SOHO NAS systems. Our standalone PC testbed was also used for some of the NAS testing. Our Summer 2012 NAS testbed's specifications are provided below:
| NAS Benchmarking Testbed Setup [ Summer 2012 ] | |
| Processor | Intel i7-3770K CPU - 4C/8T - 3.50GHz, 8MB Cache |
| Motherboard | Asus P8H77-M Pro |
| OS Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB |
| Secondary Drives | Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3 TB |
| Corsair Performance 3 Series™ P3-128 128 GB SSD (Offline in Host OS) | |
| Memory | G.SKILL ECO Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) F3-10666CL7D-4GBECO CAS 7-7-7-21 |
| PCI-E Slot | Quad-Port GbE Intel ESA-I340 |
| Case | Antec VERIS Fusion Remote Max |
| Power Supply | Antec TruePower New TP-550 550W |
| Host Operating System | Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise |
| . | |
A Windows 7 virtual machine was set up using Hyper-V with the following configuration
| Windows 7 Ultimate x64 : Guest OS | |
| Processor | Single Physical Core of Intel i7-3770K |
| OS Hard Drive | VHD File on Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB |
| Secondary Hard Drive | Corsair Performance 3 Series™ P3-128 GB SSD |
| Memory | 1 GB |
The following NAS units were used for testing the WD Red drives in RAID-1 configuration.
- LaCie 2big NAS
- Netgear NV+ v2
- Synology DS211+
The drives were benchmarked against 2 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm drives that were bundled with the LaCie 2big NAS.
An important aspect of NAS systems that we haven't covered in detail is the effect of prolonged usage and how differently the NAS performs when it is close to full capacity. Towards this, we also used our build-in-progress NAS testbed to stress the WD Red drives in the Synology D211+. The details of this separate testbed and methodology are described in a later section.
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vgray35@hotmail.com - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
The GREEN drives are performing well for only one reason - they are not being subjected to extreme temp cycling. Constant temps increase hard drive life quite dramatically. That same drive would quickly die in a laptop that is not routinely monitored for operating temps, with cooling filters cleaned on a regular basis. Turning the laptop on and off regularly will kill a GREEN hard drive quickly.It is all about extremes of temp cycling. I would not risk keeping the GREEN drives, when you could upgrade to RED at a convenient point in time, rather than be subjected to recovering from an actual hard drive failure. It is quicker, simpler, and less painful to do it now before they fail. Running 3 years on GREEN is one very risky business. Reply
Gr8Ape - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
i can not +1 this enough. Replydj christian - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
Which i have done. Had no problems with the Green discs since i bought them and they've been running for 6 and 8-thousand hours respectively. Replypieterjan - Wednesday, September 26, 2012 - link
Aggressive head parking (5 seconds) probably adds to the quick failure. The wdidle3 tool lets you disable it, however. In fact, except for the anti vibration feature and 24/7 support (that doesn't exist outside the US), I see little difference between the red and green drives... ReplyPhynaz - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Pretty horrible article, charts are unreadable.Actual writing is difficult to read, please be more concise.
Oh and crap like "IT departments have been tempted to use consumer drives". Absolute bullshit. If the author has done this he should be fired from his job. Reply
mwildtech - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Cut him a break man. If you don't like the article, then don't read it. Not bullshit on IT departments not tempted to use consumer drives. A ton on schools and S&L Gov IT Departments use consumer drives in their NAS devices. I know, because they buy them from me. ReplyGigantopithecus - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Yet another useless comment from Phynass. The graphs are perfectly legible, the writing is fine, and if you've never seen an IT department use consumer drives, you've never worked with small businesses. Get a life you fucking nitwit. ReplyAzethoth - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.Gosh, am I doing something wrong using cheap drives in a RAID? Am I going to get fired?
Do you scream when you type, because I don't want cheetos sprayed all over me. Does your Mom mind when you throw tantrums in the basement?
PS: you need to just turn on caps lock and leave it on. Reply
yyrkoon - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
LOL cheetos . . .And yeah, I guess it was an accident that SAS controllers can interface with SATA drives . . . Reply
Sivar - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
"Pretty horrible article, charts are unreadable."I find them easy to read, but if you are having trouble you can click on each to scale it up in size. Ganesh even saved them as PNG, and kept the colors simple (as is best to do with PNG/GIF), so the fine sizes are very small and the charts look as intended (no JPEG artifacts).
"Actual writing is difficult to read, please be more concise."
I found the writing to be of generally high quality. Perhaps you should offer some examples of overly verbose writing. I'm not claiming there aren't any examples, just that providing some will help make your criticisms more constructive. :)
"Oh and crap like "IT departments have been tempted to use consumer drives". Absolute bullshit. If the author has done this he should be fired from his job."
No, it is not.
Your experience may be limited to well-funded, large IT organizations. I have worked in both poorly funded (school / non-profit, etc.) and "by the book" well-funded companies, like the one I am in now.
I have personally used non-enterprise drives in 24/7 RAID arrays. I researched them first, of course. Some even support, or supported, TLER through special utilities. My own home server has eight Samsung F4s that have worked perfectly for almost 3 years (not that a single data point is very useful).
When you have a smaller budget than list of requirements, you make due, and document the reasons for the decisions made. It's part of real-world IT -- not everyone can afford a NetApp storage rack! Reply