[section_title title=”Introduction & Closer Look”]
Introduction & Closer Look
Brand: Western Digital (WD)
Model: WD 6TB Red (NAS) – (WD60EFRX)
UK Price: £201.95 @ Amazon UK (At time of review)
US Price: $248.00 @ Amazon US (At time of review)
Storage is a big deal for some and in realistic terms, you couldn’t run a PC or system without at least some form of it. Traditional mechanical hard drives have been rightly replaced by NAND technology found in today’s solid state drives, or SSD’s as they are more widely known as. One thing that remains true however, you do get a much higher £/$ per GB with mechanical than SSD and it shows no sign of changing anytime soon.
When 128/256/480/512GB is enough and the budget is available, it’s a battle the SSD will win all day long in terms of performance and overall snappiness, but for those requiring much more storage such as 2/3/4/6TB etc., mechanical is the only cost effective option available.
One of the leading companies in storage technology and most certainly popular among consumers is Western Digital or WD as they tend to be referred to in this decade. With many varieties of consumer HDD and with a very easy colour coding system, WD has a mechanical HDD for virtually any scenario, with some interesting models to say the least. Today however, we will be taking a look at a few drives from their NAS range; known more widely as WD Reds. We have 4 x 6TB Reds which we are grateful to Western Digital for providing for us today, but how much performance can a single 6TB hard drive provide in comparison to 2, 3 or 4 in a RAID 0 array? We are here to find out, so you don’t have to…
I would be surprised if you didn’t know what a mechanical hard drive looked like, but assuming you are new to the concept because perhaps you have only just got into computers and can only relate to an SSD. So as you can see below, the WD Red 6TB hard drive can be clearly distinguished from other brands or flavours of WD drives with its bright, but stylish white and red label. This contains information such as the serial number, storage size, model number and even US patent codes; something WD is very proud to display on each drive they sell.
In terms of mounting holes and screw placement, you can click here to see the mounting holes specifications guide WD themselves put together – http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-771970.pdf
Let’s see how these specialist NAS drives perform in singular form and also in RAID 0 with up to 4 drives…
I believe WD’s “Red” series HDDs have a dynamic balancing feature in the main bearings.
Also, when one of the drives in a RAID-0 array fails, it must be replaced and the
entire array re-built: this is not much different from the steps that must be taken
when a single “JBOD” HDD fails. We use a lot of RAID-0 arrays, for speed, and
we LUV them! Lastly, in future reviews, you might want to mention the ratio
of (price) / (warranty years). Most often, the 5-year warranties excel on this metric.
Why? Why only synthetic, worthless benchmarks? Of course 2 disks in RAID0 are going to have 2 times everything! We don’t need benchmarks to prove it, logic proves it!
Why can’t there be one benchmark on the whole Internet, of HDD RAID0 vs no RAID testing real-world scenarios, with a RAID controller (and comparing hardware and software controllers)? And by real-world I don’t mean copying speed as that’s as obvious as synthetic benchmark results.
I know this thread is olddd .. but the response above by Karol is brilliant .. there is a definite anti RAID thing generally these days… what I find hilarious is they state RAID 0 gives minimal performance increase. Then they go into RAID 10 and then talk about how much faster it is, and it’s awesome blah blah .. RAID 10 is by its nature slower than RAID 0 but despite that they say it’s crap I one sentence then talk about how fast it is in another!
They also love to bring in drive failure .. I have owned many very high performance PC’s over 35 years, and have had precisely 1 drive failure – BUT that was on a single external HDD .. So I have always used hardware RAID on all my setups, with 0 failures .. What’s more I was State Manager of a company who imported RAID cards and massive pre-built. RAID 5 drives. We had only 1 instance of a failure, the RAID 5 array lost 3 drives simultaneously – which obviously was a huge problem .. the fact it was Australia’s largest advertising agency at the time made it more fun, and I put in 36 hour day to get it sorted .. BUT that problem came to be because of a well known issue with the Seagate Barracudas at that time.
So this doubles your chance of failure is an incorrect understanding of real world statistics. It doubles nothing. In either case the chance of 1 drive going boom is the same and if that happens in any case then both RAID 0 and normal setup is gone.
Even if it doubled your chance of failure your talking .02% vs .01% or some stupid comparison like that. RAID failures are usually software RAID or non matching drives or other plain bad setup