WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB SATA Hard Drive Review

Testing the HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB Hard Drive

Our Intel Xeon Scalable server test system configuration is the following and the same we use for our NAS endpoint testing and our AI and deep learning GPU testing.

• Motherboard: ASUS WS C621E SAGE Motherboard
• CPU: 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6134 (8 core / 16 Threads)
• GPU: ASUS ROG Strix GTX1080 Ti OC
• Cooling: Noctua NH-U14S DX-3647 LGA3647
• RAM: 12x Micron 16GB Low Profile
• SSD: Samsung PM961 1TB
• OS: Windows 10 Pro

This is a fairly solid configuration. We have more cooling and higher frequency processors than in many server applications, but this platform has served us very well.

CrystalDiskMark

First, we wanted to run CrystalDiskMark, for a quick check on the disks. This is a fairly simple test but it is a popular one.

Overall we see better numbers than the WD 10TB Red drives we have tested before in our WD Easystore 10TB drive review. The HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB, however, gets almost double the Write Speeds but drops much lower in 4KIB Q1T1 reads. There seem to be some firmware optimizations at play here.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark is an older utility that does a good job of testing simple sequential performance at different transfer sizes. Here is what the performance looks like:

With ATTO we see the HGST Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB drives pulling approximately 50 MB/s faster in Transfer Rates compared to the WD 10TB Reds. That is significant as it equates to an almost 25% performance increase.

Parkdale

Parkdale is a fast benchmark which reports sequential read and write performance numbers.

Parkdale shows the HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB to be approximately 5 Mbyte/sec slower than the 10TB Red Pro NAS drives, but very close. At the same time, it is 30-40 MB/s faster than WD 10TB Red standard drives so that is an enormous improvement.

HD Tune Pro

HD Tune Pro can run several benchmarks on your drives; we unlocked the Pro version to give access to all benchmarks.

As we have seen, the HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB compares well to the WD 10TB Red Pro drives in our tests and we see this trend with HD Tune Pro benchmarks. The HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB will fall only a slight 5 MB/s generally and in some cases with slight differences between tests.

Both the HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB and WD 10TB Red Pro fall within error range in these tests.

AIDA64 Disk Test

AIDA64 Read Test Suite Benchmark runs fairly quickly, it also confirms close results to what we have seen thus far.

AIDA64 Read Test Suite Benchmark runs fairly quickly, it also confirms close results to the WD 10TB Red Pro drives.

AIDA64 Linear Write test is an extensive benchmark that takes a substantial amount of time to complete, with the 10TB drives this benchmark took almost two full days to run for each disk.

Data from this benchmark can be saved to an Excel file and plotted which we did for the HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB Hard Drives.

Here we see the HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB drives to boost performance with Linear Writes at the outer edge of the disk of approximately 40 MB/s, this drops off to approximately 30 MB/s slower at the inner edge of the disk. More data is written at the outer edge versus the inner edges of a hard drive.

Before we look at temperatures let us look at our HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB drives is a NAS environment.