Battle of the 4 TB NAS Drives: WD Red and Seagate NAS HDD Face-Off
by Ganesh T S on September 4, 2013 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Seagate
- HDDs
- Western Digital
- Enterprise
Performance - Networked Environment
LenovoEMC's PX2-300D (based on the Intel Atom D525) was used as the testbed for evaluating the performance of the drives in a NAS enclosure. The PX2-300D is a 2-bay NAS unit. Only JBOD, RAID-0 and RAID-1 configurations are possible. Due to the lack of multiple samples of the Seagate NAS HDD, we restricted ourselves to evaluating a single disk configuration (JBOD) over the network A CIFS share was set up on the NAS and mapped on a Windows 7 VM. Intel NASPT / robocopy as well as IOMeter traces were run on this CIFS share.
Intel NASPT / robocopy
As expected, the WD Re takes the lead in many of the benchmarks. However, the Seagate NAS HDD is no slouch, and actually manages to hold its own in most of them (in fact, the read performance is pretty decent in this configuration).
IOMeter
IOMeter provides even more interesting results. The Seagate NAS HDD actually surpasses the WD Red in three of the four benchmark runs. That said, performance is only half the story in the 1-5 bay NAS market. Power consumption is also a very important metric. How much of a penalty do we have for the increased performance? The next section provides us some answers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
54 Comments
View All Comments
zlandar - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Would really like a comparison in a RAID-5 setup with 4 drives since that's what I use for media storage.Tell Seagate to send you 3 more drives!
otherwise - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Does anyone know how read patrolling factors into usage numbers? There is no way I would come even close to 150 TB/yr in a home NAS with my own data, but with ZFS read patrolling going on in the background I don't exactly know what the true load is.bobbozzo - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
I don't really understand these read or read/write ratings... iirc, Google's data said reads and writes do not affect failure rate on hard drives. (SSD's are obviously a different story, for writes).htspecialist - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
I have had good experience with Hitachi drives in NAS use. HGST has both consumer class and enterprise class 7200 rpm 4tb drives capable of NAS use. Any plans to include the HGST in the review evaluation of 4tb NAS capable drives?wintermute000 - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
yah I've had several WD and Seagate failures over the last 6-7 years of running 4 drives in a RAID5 but no Hitachi failures, running all hitachi nowiwod - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
To me, Speed doesn't matter any more. Not for NAS Market. Since even the slowest HDD will saturate 1Gbits Ethernet in Sequential Read Write, and Random Read Write are slow as well as mostly limited by the NAS CPU as well.I want Price and Disk Size. Reliability is also a concern as well but since most HDD will just fail in one way or another over time It is best to have something like Synology where you over a number of disk you could have up to 2 HDD failure.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Are the idle power numbers in the chart correct?It looks like the decimal point was pushed to right...
KAlmquist - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
The power numbers are wall power, so it includes power supply losses and the power consumed by the LenovoEMC PX2-300D, in addition to the power consumed by the hard drive. So the absolute values aren't useful (unless you own a PX2-300D), but the numbers do show which drives consume less power.mcfaul - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
seconded, i have 32 x 3tb drives.. the heat adds up....mcfaul - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
"We have also been very impressed with WD's response to various user complaints about the first generation Red drives."Can you expand on what the complaints were, and what WD have done about them? I've only heard good things about the Red drives