Today we continue our drive reviews with a set of Western Digital Red 10TB NAS hard drives. In this case, we have two Red 10TB NAS to review. Many of us here consider Western Digital Red NAS drives to be a staple of our NAS systems, in this review, we jump the capacity up to a huge 10TB for each drive.
These hard drives are helium filled for smoother disk operation, include NASware 3.0 and are designed for NAS platforms with up to 8 drive bays. The new WD Red 10TB NAS drives run with seven platers at around 5400 RPM. Warranties support include three years for the Red NAS drives.
The new line of WD Red NAS drives includes NASware 3.0 which optimizes power, performance, and reliability in multiple drive environments.
Western Digital Red NAS Hard Drive Specifications
Here is a specs table for the five drives in the current generation family from 10TB to 3TB.
WD Red 10TB NAS SpecificationsMore detailed Information about Western Digital Red NAS Hard Drives.
Western Digital Red 10TB NAS Hard Drive Overview
Let us take a look at these new hard drives from Western Digital. Our sample units from WD did not come with retail packaging. Many users will opt for bare drives to put into their NAS systems anyway.
A close look at the drive label shows information about the hard drive. We spot manufacture date, part numbers and these drives come with 256MB Cache.
Flipping the drive over and looking at the back side, we see the back is fairly clean looking with the PCB supported with blue foam to help dampen vibrations.
We finish off with a close up on the SATA and Power connections at the edge of the hard drive.
Western Digital Red NAS Hard Drive Performance
At the time of this review, we have a Synology DS916+ 4-Bay NAS and several smaller 2-Bay NAS units in our Lab. We wanted to use the most powerful NAS box we had in the Lab at the time so the NAS box itself would offer the highest performance with our drives. The DS916+ is a 4-Bay NAS, using two hard drives does limit us to what Raid types that we can use, we did include Synology SHR, JBOD, and Raid 0 data sets.
Intel NAS Performance Toolkit
The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (Intel NASPT) is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable performance comparisons between network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
You can see in all Raid types tested the new WD Red 10TB NAS hard drives outperform the others tested. All though the difference is not large they still hold a performance edge.
Let us rerun the benchmarks with encrypted folders.
With encrypted tests complete, we find the WD Red 10TB NAS hard drives still hold the performance edge. In some benchmarks, the difference is greater.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark measures performance in hard drives and SSDs, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage.
With ATTO we see standard performance numbers with the WD Red 10TB NAS hard drives, capping out at 216 MB/s transfer rates. The WD Red 10TB NAS hard drives ramp up quickly and show solid numbers.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives and SSDs.
Running CrystalDiskMark with empty drives shows 212.9 MB/s sequential read and 214.7 write performance.
AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
With AIDA64 Disk Benchmark module, we can measure the performance of the PC’s storage devices, including (S)ATA or SCSI hard disk drives, RAID arrays, optical drives, solid-state drives (SSD), USB drives and memory cards.
For this benchmark, we only run the Read Test Suite since NAS drives in this class tend to follow write once, read many, delete infrequently usage patterns. Here we notice that the inside of the disks are hitting just below 1GbE speed each. On the other hand, the middle and outer portions of the disks are hitting well over 1GbE speeds.
Conclusion
Looking for larger capacity hard drives to fill your NAS with, the new WD Red 10TB NAS drives offer serious capacity and performance to fill this role. The Red 10TB NAS drives are helium filled which help add capacity and coupled with Helioseal that gives smaller gaps between tracks and 3D Active Balance Plus to boost performance. NASware 3.0 comes included with this new series of drives which offers seamless integration with MyCloud Pro and MyCloud Expert range of NAS drives.
Although these are not necessarily performance oriented drives, even a RAID 1 set can more than saturate a 1GbE link in most scenarios. That has important implications as users chose their NAS systems. We suggest performance minded users opt for using these drives with dual 1GbE or 10GbE NAS systems to extract full performance.
Moving to 10TB drives does cost a fair amount more, but what you get with WD Red 10TB NAS HDD’s are drives with solid performance and massive capacity. You also can use fewer drives with the 10TB capacity which means lower power consumption and fewer drives in your NAS.
