Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Internals
I won't be breaking into the clean-space of these new drives, but here's a peek under the PCBs:
A closer look at the 6TB Red:
…and a closer look at the 4TB Red Pro:
The Red Pro has additional components lifted from WD's enterprise series drives, including accelerometers used for their RAFF vibration compensation.
Specific to this Review
Back in our Caviar Black WD1002FAEX (6Gb/sec SATA) review, we determined that the current Marvell 6Gb/sec controllers and drivers, while decent, fall a bit short of Intel's native controllers. Luckily these days we have native 6Gb/sec from Intel and we are not stuck with these stop gap measures. My standing recommendation is to always use the native chipset when employing high speed storage. We've seen 15% drops in write speeds in some instances with the Marvell controller paired to high end HDDs (for some benches) – and that was comparing to a 3Gb/sec native controller!
Marvell controllers and drivers are not sufficiently refined for comparative HDD testing.
Test System Setup
We currently employ a pair of testbeds. A newer ASUS P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt and an ASUS Z87-PRO. Variance between both boards has been deemed negligible.
PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and Kingston for supplying some of the components of our test rigs.
| Hard Drive Test System Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-4770K |
| Motherboard | ASUS P8Z77-V Pro/TB / ASUS Z87-PRO |
| Memory | Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3-2133 CL9 |
| Hard Drive | G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD |
| Sound Card | N/A |
| Video Card | Intel® HD Graphics 4600 |
| Video Drivers | Intel |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-650TX |
| DirectX Version | DX9.0c |
| Operating System | Windows 8.1 X64 |
- PCMark Vantage and 7
- Yapt
- IOMeter
- HDTach *omitted due to incompatibility with >2TB devices*
- HDTune
- PCPer File Copy Test
I am a capitalist. I do not
I am a capitalist. I do not use red drives!!! lol!
Then buy a purple drive, you
Then buy a purple drive, you fairy 😛
If you ain’t black, you ain’t
If you ain’t black, you ain’t crap.
Don’t be mean, buy Green.
Don’t be mean, buy Green.
Good to know these are
Good to know these are affordable. I’ve still got about a year before I run out of space using 4TB REDs, then I’ll start upgrading with 6TB drives. I tried Seagate’s NAS drives but the one’s I bought (at least) were way too loud for use at home.
3TB is still the best $/GB at
3TB is still the best $/GB at $0.043/GB. Better density for the NAS drives, though not sure the price is worth it.
No. 5TB Seagate externals
No. 5TB Seagate externals are $190. $0.038/GB. I can’t buy them fast enough!
I think your failure premise
I think your failure premise is a bit contrived. No one should be running a RAID system of any type without full SMART checks on a regular basis at the very least.
I’ve personally had RAIDs
I've personally had RAIDs fail in that scenario even with SMART checks in place, as well as weekly full array data scrubs. Fact is that unless you have some form of TLER, a second drive failure that occurs mid rebuild will cause most RAID controllers to offline the array.
Ryan had also had such a failure (using Seagate drives), and I had to recover his array by imaging the non-failed drives and manually de-striping in software.
Curious Allyn, which imaging
Curious Allyn, which imaging software did you use to rescue that array ???
It wasn’t the imaging
It wasn't the imaging software that did the rescue – all it did was create images of the drives (and read past the unreadable areas after hours of timeouts / retries). One I had the images, I coded something myself to re-stitch, using alternating parity (i.e. two drives had unreadable sectors in (mostly) alternating areas relative to each other).
That was for my array recovery. Ryan's was easier, as he had just one drive with a small cluster of bad sectors causing his array to timeout. I was able to image that drive and re-stitch that array back together with a tool from Runtime Software – but with some custom settings I had to come up with myself, as Ryan's array was not easy for that software to 'lock' onto in auto mode.
So the pro is “better” &
So the pro is “better” & expected to last longer, yet is 6dBA LOUDER than the standard WD RED….
Also, did anyone else notice they changed the “Non-recoverable read errors per bits” to look better despite being the same?
It’s a 7200 RPM enterprise
It's a 7200 RPM enterprise spec drive. *Of course* it is faster / louder.
You should look into how
You should look into how Seagate is intentionally crippling consumer HDDs with low APM states and special firmware to scare enterprise customers into buying more expensive drives.
Can we mix and match Green
Can we mix and match Green and Red drives?
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Hi I’ve got 3 existing 1year
Hi I’ve got 3 existing 1year old WD RED 4TB drives and am moving to a new Synology 1515plus. I’d like to expand my storage and am considering a RED PRO instead of buying another standard 4TB RED drive
My question is this, is it bad to mix a new 4TB RED PRO with the older 4TB standard RED drives in a RAID?
Thanks in advance
I have almost the same
I have almost the same question, except i have 5 x one year old wd red 3tb’s and am expanding to 8 drives…Would it be better to use 3 new pro drives, or stick with 3 new standard red drives?
Thanks in advance.
oh, and by the way…..Merry Christmas to all on here!
Pro drives would be your best
Pro drives would be your best bet, since they have accelerometers in like the Se drives to actively reduce vibration. Though even the newer plain reds have nasware 3.0 and so have software based vibration reduction, allowing upto 8 drives.
WD have also said they will honour warranties of those using older (1-5 bay drives) in 8 bay configs.
Perhaps on cost, plain reds would be better, don’t forget the red pro isn’t a home NAS drive, it’s louder, faster, and uses more power (around 5w/drive more), designed for heavier use.