Western Digital 2.5″ Red 1TB NAS HDD Review

Introduction Launched just over a year ago, Western Digital's Red line of drives, along with an easier to understand product line-up (Greed, Blue, Black and so on) have changed the way that many consumers look at their storage. The Red drives are built primarily for a NAS (Network Attached Storage) environment, but they are also suited for SOHO users who want drives that will deliver enterprise class performance but without the hefty price tag that the higher class of drive tends to come with. With network storage becoming more of a common entity outside of the enterprise sector, for example in homes and offices, the Red line of drive have delivered enterprise class features and reliability with their three-year warranty for users with one to five bay NAS systems as typically seen in the SOHO and SMB sector where these drives are targeted. As the density of storage has gone up we've seen the Red drives reach up to a whopping 4TB in a 3.5" format, but with users wanting more compact systems, WD had to think ahead of the game and this leads us to the 2.5" versions that we now also have on offer today. Offering up either 750GB or 1TB of storage each, the 2.5" drives run with a, Intellipower spindle speed of 5400RPM and with 16MB of cache on a SATA 6Gbps interface, they are rated to handle a workload of 120-150TB of data per year, which for the most part is well over the data throughput that most small businesses will ever put their drives through. A Closer Look Having a browse over the 2.5" Red, we can see from the drives label, that this particular drive as mentioned has a 1TB capacity (Model number WD10JFCX) and comes with Western Digital's NASware 2.0 features. NASware 2.0 is an exclusive technology to WD that gives their drives far more enhanced reliability with a 35% improvement in MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) over their standard desktop drives, better compatibility with NAS systems, a more energy-efficient operation which in turn leads to lower operating temperatures, a longer warranty for piece of mind and a system known as 3D Active Balance Plus. This dual-plane balance control, has helped to drastically increase the reliability of the drives - with a better balance, there is far less vibrations and this means the platters will degrade at a much lower rate thus increasing the longevity of the drive and its performance Measuring in at only 9.5mm high, The 2.5" red drive may not be as slim as the top end SSDs that we see around today, but for a drive that packs 1TB of storage this profile is by no means 'thick'. Flipping the drive over and having a look at the PCB, the 2.5" Red's PCB covers the majority of the drive, with a the actuators mechanism requiring a small cut-out to one corner and the spindle also poking through the bottom of the drive. Removing the PCB we can see where the drives motor contacts are to the top and to the far right is an 18 pin data header for linking the drives internals with the PCB. A thin foam layer reduces any resonant noise that may be produced during drive operation. Looking at the PCB itself, we can once again see to the bottom left a set of contact pads - similar to those found on Intel CPUs for connecting the PCB to the platters inside and on the other side of the PCB are the four contact pins that power the spindle, running the drive up to 5400RPM. Keeping the drives operation in full swing is a Marvell produced 88i9446-NDB2 high performance storage controller. Paired with the controller is a Samsung branded K4H2816380-LCC which gives the drive a mere 16MB of cache. The last main chip on the PCB is a WD branded Nautilus motor controller. With this drive having Intellispeed capabilities, the WD branded chip is geared for the NASware operations that WD require over third-party controllers. Test Procedure Test system: Asus Maximus V Formula Intel Core i7 3770k Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB XFX Radeon HD 7970 Corsair H100i Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: AS SSD ATTO CrystalDiskMark Anvil's Storage Utilities RC6 IOMeter AS SSD The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1GB file respectively. The 2.5" Red is quick off the mark to show what it's made of with both read and write speeds passing over the 100MB/s mark with ease. ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Within ATTO, we can see that underneath the cover the drive is able to give near 120MB/s read and write speeds - ideal for RAID configurations. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of "CrystalDiskMark": Sequential reads/writes Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes Text copy Change dialog design internationalization (i18n) Like ATTO, CDM gives us similarly high read and write figures. Looking at the 512k sector as well, the drive also performs very well with well over 63MB/s write and 43MB/s read. Anvil's Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, it's completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term. Within Anvils we can get a view on how the drives access times are affected when handling different block sizes. With response times as low as ~2ms when writing and ~7ms when reading the Red is very quick off the mark. IOMeter IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the 'Maximum Disk Size', 'Starting Disk Sector' and '# of Outstanding I/Os'. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the 'Access Specifications' configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are: Transfer Request Size Percent Random/Sequential distribution. Percent Read/Write Distribution Aligned I/O's. Reply Size TCP/IP status Burstiness. Hard drives as we know are not built for IOPs performance, but with around 137 IOPs read and write, this number is on par for a drive of this calibre in a single disk setup. Final Thoughts Pricing Like their full sized 3.5" counterparts, the 2.5" drives both come in with a good price point for their size. With prices ranging from around £60 to just over £160 for the 3.5" 1-4TB drives and the 2.5" drives coming in at around £60 for the 750GB model and just under £70 for the 1TB model, the pricing is very well matched for the capacities available. Naturally with the pricing so close on the 2.5" drives, the 1TB drive is by far, the best value out of the two. Overview As I mentioned right back at the start of this review, Western Digital's Red line of drives have made vast improvements in SOHO and SMB storage arrays giving them the performance and reliability that they need but on a scale that doesn't carry the same price tags that the enterprise class drives bring with them. With more and more users wishing to scale down the physical size of their storage and a number of home users catering their own media servers, drives like this are ideal for the job with their low power consumption, dense storage capability, better vibration tolerance and a life span that is far greater than their standard desktop counterparts such as the mid-range Blue line of drives. Comparing this drive to it's bigger 3.5" sibling, there are only two real differences to be had, the first is a slower spindle speed of 5400RPM instead of 7200RPM and a much smaller cache of only 16MB instead of 64MB. Whilst it would be nice to see a slightly larger cache, by the time we take into account that these drives are likely to be used in a RAID5 array (the typical array of choice for SOHO and SMB users) and the fact that Gigabit Ethernet has a theoretical limit of around 130MB/s, then this performance bottleneck from a single drive is soon eliminated. With a three-year warranty and a desirable price tag to suit, both for the 2.5" and 3.5" drives. Anyone who is looking for a 1-5 disk RAID array should really be looking towards these drives for their storage needs. Pros: Built for NAS 3 year warranty Enterprise features and reliability Low power usage 1m hour MTBF Desirable price Cons: 16MB buffer "Years of experience has made Western Digital one of the leading manufacturers in desktop and enterprise storage. Their Red line of drives have also proven that they are willing to give the general consumer a drive with enterprise level features and with a new set of 2.5" drives to now add to their portfolio, its clear they will cover every angle to cater for the consumers growing needs." Thanks to Western Digital for providing us with this review sample