6 TB NAS Drives: WD Red, Seagate Enterprise Capacity and HGST Ultrastar He6 Face-Off
by Ganesh T S on July 21, 2014 11:00 AM ESTIntroduction and Testbed Setup
The SMB / SOHO / consumer NAS market has been experiencing rapid growth over the last few years. With declining PC sales and increase in affordability of SSDs, hard drive vendors have scrambled to make up for the deficit and increase revenue by targeting the NAS market. The good news is that the growth is expected to accelerate in the near future (thanks to increasing amounts of user-generated data through the usage of mobile devices).
Back in July 2012, Western Digital began the trend of hard drive manufacturers bringing out dedicated units for the burgeoning SOHO / consumer NAS market with the 3.5" Red hard drive lineup. The firmware was tuned for 24x7 operation in SOHO and consumer NAS units. 1 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB versions were made available at launch. Later, Seagate also jumped into the fray with a hard drive series carrying similar firmware features. Over the last two years, the vendors have been optimizing the firmware features as well as increasing the capacities. On the enterprise side, hard drive vendors have been supplying different models for different applications, but all of them are quite suitable for 24x7 NAS usage. For example, the WD Re and Seagate Constellation ES are tuned for durability under heavy workloads, while the WD Se and Seagate Terascale units are targeted towards applications where scalability and capacity are important.
Usually, the enterprise segment is quite conservative when it comes to capacity, but datacenter / cloud computing requirements have resulted in capacity becoming a primary factor to ward off all-flash solutions. HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, was the first vendor to bring a 6 TB hard drive to the market. The sealed Helium-filled HDDs could support up to seven disks (instead of the five usually possible in air-filled units), resulting in a bump up to 6 TB in the same height as traditional 3.5" drives. Seagate adopted a six-platter design for the Enterprise Capacity v4 6 TB version. Today, Western Digital launched the first NAS-specific 6 TB drive targeting SOHO / home consumers, the WD Red 6 TB. In expanding their Red portfolio, WD provides us an opportunity to see how the 6 TB version stacks up against other offerings targeting the NAS market.
The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this review, we will discuss some of these aspects while evaluating three different hard drives targeting the NAS market:
- Western Digital Red 6 TB [ WDC WD60EFRX-68MYMN0 ]
- Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4 6 TB [ ST6000NM0024-1HT17Z ]
- HGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB [ HUS726060ALA640 ]
Each of these drives target slightly different markets. While the WD Red is mainly for SOHO and home consumers, the Seagate Enterprise Capacity targets ruggedness for heavy workloads while the HGST Ultrastar aims for data centers and cloud storage applications with a balance of performance and power efficiency.
Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology
Unlike our previous evaluation of 4 TB drives, we managed to obtain enough samples of the new drives to test them in a proper NAS environment. As usual, we will start off with a feature set comparison of the three drives, followed by a look at the raw performance when connected directly to a SATA 6 Gbps port. In the same PC, we also evaluate the performance of the drive using some aspects of our direct attached storage (DAS) testing methodology. For evaluation in a NAS environment, we configured three drives in a RAID-5 volume and processed selected benchmarks from our standard NAS review methodology.
We used two testbeds in our evaluation, one for benchmarking the raw drive and DAS performance and the other for evaluating performance when placed in a NAS unit.
AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration | |
Motherboard | Asus Z97-PRO Wi-Fi ac ATX |
CPU | Intel Core i7-4790 |
Memory |
Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY32GX3M4A2133C11 32 GB (4x 8GB) DDR3-2133 @ 11-11-11-27 |
OS Drive | Seagate 600 Pro 400 GB |
Optical Drive | Asus BW-16D1HT 16x Blu-ray Write (w/ M-Disc Support) |
Add-on Card | Asus Thunderbolt EX II |
Chassis | Corsair Air 540 |
PSU | Corsair AX760i 760 W |
OS | Windows 8.1 Pro |
Thanks to Asus and Corsair for the build components |
In the above testbed, the hot swap bays of the Corsair Air 540 have to be singled out for special mention.
They were quite helpful in getting the drives processed in a fast and efficient manner for benchmarking. For NAS evaluation, we used the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP. This is very similar to the unit we reviewed last year, except that we have a slightly faster CPU, more RAM and support for both SATA and SAS drives.
The NAS setup itself was subjected to benchmarking using our standard NAS testbed.
AnandTech NAS Testbed Configuration | |
Motherboard | Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual LGA2011 SSI-EEB |
CPU | 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630L |
Coolers | 2 x Dynatron R17 |
Memory | G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL (8x8GB) CAS 10-10-10-30 |
OS Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
Secondary Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
Tertiary Drive | OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88 (1.6TB PCIe SSD) |
Other Drives | 12 x OCZ Technology Vertex 4 64GB (Offline in the Host OS) |
Network Cards | 6 x Intel ESA I-340 Quad-GbE Port Network Adapter |
Chassis | SilverStoneTek Raven RV03 |
PSU | SilverStoneTek Strider Plus Gold Evolution 850W |
OS | Windows Server 2008 R2 |
Network Switch | Netgear ProSafe GSM7352S-200 |
Thank You!
We thank the following companies for helping us out with our NAS testbed:
- Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E5-2630L CPUs and the ESA I-340 quad port network adapters
- Thanks to Asus for the Z9PE-D8 WS dual LGA 2011 workstation motherboard
- Thanks to Dynatron for the R17 coolers
- Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsZ 64GB DDR3 DRAM kit
- Thanks to OCZ Technology for the two 128GB Vertex 4 SSDs, twelve 64GB Vertex 4 SSDs and the OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88
- Thanks to SilverStone for the Raven RV03 chassis and the 850W Strider Gold Evolution PSU
- Thanks to Netgear for the ProSafe GSM7352S-200 L3 48-port Gigabit Switch with 10 GbE capabilities.
83 Comments
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JohnMD1022 - Thursday, July 24, 2014 - link
Actually, yes.I have seen too many bad Seagate drives to use or recommend.
At one point, I had 9 bad Seagates in my shop at the same time.
In addition, their customer service leaves a lot to be desired.
comomolo - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Have you actually read the article?It's clearly written that the drive DID NOT fail. The drive in question passed all the tests and ran perfectly fine by itself on a PC. The author states this looks like a compatibility issue with QNAP's server.
GTVic - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
A lot of people claim the failure is related to shipping methods, particularly blaming Newegg on this. Proper shipping = reliable drive. I'd believe that sooner than "WD Red sucks" comments.Wixman666 - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I have a sea of WD Red hard drives out in the field at various customer locations. I've only ever had one fail.romrunning - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I don't understand - if you had both WD Red and WD Red Pro drives (according to your other quick note on these new drive models), why didn't you review the WD Red Pro?ganeshts - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
As I wrote in the pipeline section, the WD Red Pro review will come next week.This is for the 6 TB capacity.
The 4TB versions' review will include the WD Red Pro (sometime next week)
continuum - Saturday, July 26, 2014 - link
http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/36...Claims there's an early model issue on the regular WD Red's causing them to be invalid? But that's the only site I've heard of claiming this...
Rythan - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I've gone through this article a couple of times - where are the idle and load power numbers?ganeshts - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I will add them later tonight (along with the missing He6 benchmark numbers).romrunning - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Ah... It just seems that some of your numbers in this face-off would change if the WD drive was 7200rpm instead of 5400rpm. Perhaps that would affect your conclusion as well. But I suppose if you didn't get a 6TB WD Red Pro drive, then it's a moot point.