NAS Drive Showdown! WD Red vs Seagate NAS Drive
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,212 words · ~6 min read
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buy a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic ticket
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giveaway for a chance to win great prizes visit Intel gamingpro tocom to
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learn more Welcome to our NAS drive Roundup so we've got two contenders the
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WD red which is the original Nas optimized consumer grade hard drive and
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then we've got the newcomer the seate nas hard drive so what they both have
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going for them is longer warranty periods than a typical consumer grade
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device 247 tech support as well as a
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247 rated uh sort of operational
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workload that's that's what they're designed for to actually be used all the
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time in a storage Appliance they're both optimized for smaller rating closur so
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for example the red is good for anywhere from one to five Drive arrays and
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there's a reason for that because as much as I have always used just regular
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desktop drives in nases both seate and WD have lectured me about this because
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they're like well actually the vibrations that are passed between the drives um can be a problem in the longer
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term particularly when you pile more and more drives into an enclosure so having
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drives that are optimized for resisting any errors that might be caused by that
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vibration is definitely a positive positive thing the one key difference
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between these drives is that the WD red does tend to be a little bit more
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expensive on retailer shelves and is only available in a 3 tab capacity up
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till now and performance of these drives in Nas enclosures is very much an
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unknown at this point not too many people have really looked into it so we
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decided to take a sonology ds411 so this
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is their disc station quad Bay enclosure
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we set up a raid five in there with either four of the red 3 terabytes or
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four of the Seagate NAS drive 4 terabytes and decided to run some
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benchmarks because many people are looking at these NAS Drives going oh
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well they only run at 5400 or 5900 or
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whatever sort of Eco optimized RP M CU remember in a Naas enclosure you want
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less power consumption and you want less power consumption did I say power
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consumption twice because what I meant to say was heat output for the second
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thing you want less of both of those things so running at a lower RPM does
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help achieve that but what does that do to Performance well I'll tell you what
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we were expecting to happen is we were expecting the land interface right there
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that gigabit land interface to be the first bottleneck even running in
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something like a raid one configuration which is two Drive redundancy no
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calculations we are looking at about I mean we're looking at a maximum of 80 to
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100 megabytes perss transfer speeds if we're running in something like a raid
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five for rights we'll be lucky to get 25 to 35 megabytes per second right speeds
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which means that a 5900 RPM Drive can keep up just fine so the other
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bottleneck like I said in raid five is going to be internally here the
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processor raid five is very calculation intensive so basically what you do is
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you have at least three drives and one one of the drives worth of space is
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allocated for a parody bit which is pretty much a song that someone designs
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to sound like another song and then they actually Chang the lyrics to make it
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more comical no no not that kind of parody the real parody is data that can
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be used to reconstruct the data on the other drive so it's extremely
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computation intensive when it comes particularly to writing data to a r
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array anyway without further Ado I'm going to put some charts and graphs up
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on the screen that'll give you guys some idea of the performance differences we
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observed which I think really backs up our hypothesis in a very big way we ran
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several different tests including real world small medium and large file copy
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tests and all of these numbers are reported in the time it took to complete
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the operations with either different set of drives and then we also ran black
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Magic's dis speed test which we've found to be a fairly reproducible and just
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kind of a quick and dirty Benchmark so that gives you a synthetic Benchmark as
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well as a real world Benchmark to show you that we really didn't observe a
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difference in performance between these drives so with no real performance
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difference between the drives how do you pick which one to go with and I think
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the answer is that it comes down to trust who do you have the best experiences with over the longer term or
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the people you know or whatever else do you want to pay more for the WD or do
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you want to pay less for the Seagate or do you need the 4 tab capacity that's
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available in the seate WD doesn't have a 4 TB red yet so there's all those things
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to consider I know slick just recently purchased just four of the 3 terab WD
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Reds for a personal raid array um so
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that should give you some idea what we think of the red particularly internally
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here and speaking of things that we think very highly of internally here
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check it out right now thanks for watching this episode of Linus Tech tips
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on NAS Drives versus other more different NAS Drives and how per
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performance- wise it basically doesn't make a difference don't forget to
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