Oman
WD's Red 4TB HDD expands on the company's current offering with 33% more raw storage capacity than previously available in the same 3.5" form factor with a 6Gb/s SATA interface. The WD Red line also features 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB models, but now consumers and small businesses with one- to five-bay NAS units can install or upgrade to the full 4TB maximum, the most robust storage capacity in the industry. Other standard features with the Red 4TB are a 64MB cache and WD's Intellipower low power spindle. This Intellipower technology is significant as drives in this segment experience continuous 24×7 operation and are required to consume minimal amounts of energy in order to reduce costs.
NAS hard drives aren't necessarily required to be the highest performing drives on the market. For most buyers, the primary considerations are reliability and warranty as well as the capacity points offered. This market also places more importance on how the drive is going to operate over its lifespan. That's not to say performance isn't a possible deliberation, and the WD Red features a quoted transfer rate around 150MB/s.
The WD Red ships with features to enhance the performance and reliability of the drive. 3D Active Balance Plus is a dual-plane balance control technology that enhances overall drive performance and reliability by reducing vibration and its associated wear and tear on internal components. WD uses NASware firmware on all Red HDDs, with version 2.0 standard on the 4TB model. This firmware reduces noise and power consumption, enables users to monitor performance and reliability via the SMART command set, and provides error recovery tools.
- Model number: WD40EFRX
- Interface: SATA 6 Gb/s
- Formatted capacity: 4TB
- Form factor: 3.5-inch
- Advanced Format (AF): Yes
- RoHS compliant: Yes
- Data transfer rate (max)
- Interface speed: 6 Gb/s
- Internal transfer rate: 150 MB/s
- Cache (MB): 64
- Rotational speed (RPM): IntelliPower
- Load/unload cycles: 300,000
- Non-recoverable read errors per bits read: <1 in 1014
- MTBF (hours): 1,000,000
- Limited warranty (years): 3
- 12VDC ±10% (A, peak): 1.75
- 5VDC ±10% (A, peak): –
- Average power requirements (W)
- Read/Write: 4.5
- Idle: 3.3
- Standby/Sleep: 0.4
- Temperature (°C)
- Operating: 0 to 70
- Non-operating: -40 to 70
- Shock (Gs)
- Operating (2 ms, read/write): 30
- Operating (2 ms, read): 65
- Non-operating (2 ms): 250
- Acoustics (dBA)
- Idle: 25
- Seek (average): 28
- Height (in./mm): 1.028/26.1
- Length (in./mm): 5.787/147
- Width (in./mm, ± .01 in.): 4/101.6
- Weight (lb./kg, ± 10%): 1.50/0.68
Design and Build
The WD Red 4TB features a design similar to the WD Red 3TB we reviewed. The top of the drive features the WD branding on a product information label. While the 3TB model features four black stickers covering screws on the top cover, this 4TB model includes six.
Standard for WD HDDs, the body of the WD Red 4TB HDD is black metal. On the back of the drive, there are standard power and SATA connectors. Moving to the bottom, to remove the circuit board, we needed to remove four screws. The circuit board incorporates thermal pads to passively cool the internal components.
The WD Red 4TB HDD utilizes the Marvell 88i9446-NDB2 controller as well as 64MB of DRAM cache from the SKhynix H5PS5162GFA.
Testing Background and Comparables
HDD comparables for this review:
- Seagate Constellation CS – Enterprise Value HDD (3TB, 7,200 RPM)
- Seagate NAS HDD (4TB, 5,900 RPM)
- WD Se (4TB, 7,200RPM)
- WD Red NAS (3TB, 5K-Class RPM)
All enterprise HDDs are benchmarked on our enterprise testing platform based on a Lenovo ThinkServer RD240. The ThinkServer RD240 is configured with:
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650 (2.66GHz, 12MB Cache)
- Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition R2 SP1 64-Bit and CentOS 6.2 64-Bit
- Intel 5500+ ICH10R Chipset
- Memory – 8GB (2 x 4GB) 1333Mhz DDR3 Registered RDIMMs
- LSI 9211 SAS/SATA 6.0Gb/s HBA
Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis
Our synthetic enterprise storage benchmark process begins with an analysis of the way the drive performs during a thorough preconditioning phase. Each of the comparable drives are secure erased using the vendor's tools, preconditioned into steady state with the same workload the device will be tested with under a heavy load of 16 threads with an outstanding queue of 16 per thread, and then tested in set intervals in multiple thread/queue depth profiles to show performance under light and heavy usage.
Preconditioning and Primary Steady State Tests:
- Throughput (Read+Write IOPS Aggregate)
- Average Latency (Read+Write Latency Averaged Together)
- Max Latency (Peak Read or Write Latency)
- Latency Standard Deviation (Read+Write Standard Deviation Averaged Together)
Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes two profiles based on real-world tasks. These profiles have been developed to make it easier to compare to our past benchmarks as well as widely-published values such as max 4k read and write speed and 8k 70/30, which is commonly used for enterprise drives.
- 4k
- 100% Read or 100% Write
- 100% 4k
- 8k 70/30
- 70% Read, 30% Write
- 100% 8k
- 128k (Sequential)
- 100% Read or 100% Write
- 100% 128k
- File Server
- 80% Read, 20% Write
- 10% 512b, 5% 1k, 5% 2k, 60% 4k, 2% 8k, 4% 16k, 4% 32k, 10% 64k
- Webserver
- 100% Read
- 22% 512b, 15% 1k, 8% 2k, 23% 4k, 15% 8k, 2% 16k, 6% 32k, 7% 64k, 1% 128k, 1% 512k
In the first workload, we measured a long sample of random 4k performance with 100% write and 100% read activity. The WD Red 4TB scored 107 IOPS read and 137 IOPS write, placing it in the middle of the distribution of results, and notably better than the Red 3TB.
SIMILAR PRODUCTS
