We have just taken a look at WD Red 10TB NAS hard drives; now we explore a set of Western Digital Red 10TB Pro NAS drives. WD Red Pro NAS series designed for medium business and enterprise class use cases.
The Red Pro NAS series hard drives are also helium filled for smoother disk operation, include NASware 3.0 and can run on NAS boxes with up to 16 drive bays. Compare this to the non-Pro drives that are intended for smaller NAS systems. Like the new Red 10TB NAS drives the Pro’s offer seven platters and ups the speed to 7200 RPM. Warranty support increased to five years for the Red Pro NAS drives.
Just like the new WD Red NAS series, the new line of WD Red Pro NAS drives includes NASware 3.0 which optimizes power, performance, and reliability in multiple drive environments.
Western Digital Red Pro NAS Hard Drive Specifications
Here is the spec table for 10TB to 2TB drives:
More detailed Information about Western Digital Red Pro NAS Hard Drives.
Western Digital Red 10TB Pro NAS Hard Drive Overview
Let us take a look at these new Red Pro NAS hard drives from Western Digital. Our sample units came in a bare/ OEM configuration:
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. We also spot the “Pro” description on the bottom red bar.
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.
In summary, it is a 3.5″ 7200rpm hard drive with 10TB capacity and that is intended for NAS operation in RAID arrays.
Western Digital Red Pro NAS Hard Drive Performance
For our review, we only had two WD Red Pro 10TB hard drives available. Although the NAS we are using (the Synology DS916+ is a 4-Bay NAS), using two hard drives does limit which RAID types that we can use. We are including 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 Pro NAS Hard Drives outperform the others tested. All though the difference is not large they still hold a performance edge.
Let us re-run the benchmarks with encrypted folders.
With encrypted tests complete, we find the WD Red 10TB Pro NAS Hard Drives hold the performance edge.
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 Pro hard drives, capping out at 265 MB/s transfer rates. The WD Red 10TB Pro 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 260.5 MB/s sequential read and 261.1 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 units are primarily write once, read many scenarios. Here, the WD Red Pro 10TB drive performed extremely well. The implication of such a fast drive is that it is consistently able to saturate 1 or 2 1GbE links. That means that we see the WD Red Pro more suited to 10GbE NAS once higher-level RAID arrays are used.
Conclusion
The new WD Red 10TB Pro NAS HDDs are premium drives and offer premium performance to boot. Robust features like multi-axis shock sensors, dynamic fly height technology compensate for vibrations protect your data on the large capacity drives. Increasing spindle speeds to 7200RPM, from 5200RPM found on standard WD Red NAS drives, improves performance. The Pro series is rated for 16-Bay NAS units and offer 5-year warranties.
At 10TB, URE is likely guaranteed.. seems like the only way to reliably use drives of this (and in the future) larger is to either go RAID10, RAIDZ3, or Striped RAIDZ2’s (or RAID60 if you will), with RAID10 probably being the obvious choice, albeit at a 50% space cost. Sucks that vendors can’t get the URE rating up.
I think the other aspect to this is that even those traditional RAID models are falling out of favor compared to distributed storage and other forms of erasure coding.
Did you by any chance measure the power consumption? Because I find hard to believe that a 7200rpm drive draws 0.5W less than a normal 5400 one. Or did WD do some magic here 🙂
Dami, the drive is helium filled rather than air, thats why the 8TB and 10TB use less watts than the others on test.
I was comparing it to the 10TB non-pro model which has 6.2W.
In my country the hdd has only 2 year warranty. This is shameless. Are some of the countries more like third world, or what? Why is WD accepting this policy of the vendors?