WD Red 10TB

These units are built for the long haul rather the short spring of desktop mechanisms, and now offer massive capacities for IT managers to create arrays big enough for the majority of business needs.

Western Digital was the first drive maker to formally address the popularity of personal NAS storage devices with its Red drive series.

Design

WD Red products range from the now diminutive 750GB WD7500BFCX design up to the monstrous 10TB WD100EFAX reviewed here.

These are all standard 3.5-inch SATA drives and only vary substantially in the numbers of heads and platters, memory cache and overall capacity.

Digging into the details, the big difference between the 10TB WD100EFAX and the models beneath it is the capacity (9313.87GB unallocated), cache size and overall throughput.

As with all the WD Red drive designs, this offering balances performance, operating life, power consumption and error management.

Except with 10TB of space to fret over, those behind the WD100EFAX needed to make sure that these units didn’t have an unexpectedly high failure rate or any other problematic performance issues.

To meet these challenging objectives, Western Digital encased all seven 1.42TB platters within a helium-filled enclosure using technology acquired when it bought HGST.

Helium atoms, as we all know, are smaller than those of their oxygen and nitrogen counterparts found in air, reducing the drag on moving parts. Or that’s the theory.

However, the impact of that might be marginal, as the WD100EFAX only rotates at 5400RPM. The Red Pro variation, the WD101KFBX, spins at 7200RPM, like the rival Seagate IronWolf 10TB.

Often the biggest capacity drive isn’t the quickest, as the cache included has the most number of platters to cover. But that isn’t the case with the WD100EFAX, as it is the fastest Red series mechanism at 210MB/s.

And, amazingly, it also uses less power than the 8TB Red – just 5.7W compared to 6.4W. That might seem like a minor difference, but should you have hundreds of these running 24/7, a design that consumes 11% less power could have serious cost implications over time.

These drives will need to spin for longer to move the same amount of data as a quicker drive, in theory. But that thinking assumes drives run at full speed all the time, and that’s not often true in real-world use.

Also, if the drives are in an eSATA box, for example, that box will only be quicker with the WD100EFAX if there are three drives or less in it. That’s because the practical limit of a single SATA 3 channel is about 550MB/s, and once you’ve hit that ceiling, the speed of each drive becomes largely irrelevant.

If you want the best performance on a RAID configuration, there are solid-state PCIe options that will exceed any conventional spinning disk technology, and drive connection technologies that are better than SATA.

But there is another dimension to this drive that pertains to the volume that Western Digital sells, and the potential to ship even more units.

Pricing

At the time of writing, this drive can be bought for £292 in the UK and $324 in the US if sourced from Amazon. That equates to about 34GB per UK pound and 31GB per US dollar, about 10% cheaper than the Seagate IronWolf 10TB and almost the same price as the WD Gold 10TB.

There is, relatively speaking, a small amount of difference (1GB per dollar/pound) between this 10TB drive and its smaller WD80EFZX brother.

It undercuts the IronWolf Pro 10TB and WD Red Pro 10TB by around 20-25%. We’d mention other brands, but at this time only Western Digital and Seagate make drives of this capacity. And Seagate also offers a 12TB model for those with a serious capacity addiction.

Models that are at the very top of the food chain tend to carry a price premium for being the best, or in this case the biggest.

If you want a massive array built with the minimum number of drives the choice is Western Digital or Seagate, and at this time the 10TB Red is the most affordable option.

Performance

We put this unit through our gamut of benchmarking tools, determined to find whatever weaknesses or strengths are hidden inside.

The quoted internal transfer speed is 210MB/s, as mentioned, and that’s almost exactly what CrystalDiskMark 6.0 reported: 210.9 MB/s reads, and 211.1MB/s writes.

The Atto disk benchmark was a little more conservative, with reads peaking at 202.5MB/s and writes at 204.5MB/s.

That makes the WD Red 10TB at least 10% slower than the Seagate IronWolf 10TB, mostly because that competitor is spinning at 7200 and not 5400RPM.

Unfortunately, both those tests tend to operate the drive as desktop storage, not testing how it would perform in a server or NAS box.

Therefore we also use PCMark to test a wider pattern of activity, and here, this drive outperformed the 8TB Red noticeably, and even bettered the Seagate IronWolf 10TB slightly.

The IronWolf scored 2,969, where the WD Red 10TB managed 3,011. But the storage bandwidth in PCMark 08 of just 15MB/s is well below the 19.3MB/s that the Seagate drive offers, and also less than the new IronWolf 12TB drives.

Breaking down these tests, the WD100EFAX is good at some things and much less wonderful at others. But overall, the IronWolf 10TB drive has it beaten on raw speed.

One strength of the WD100EFAX is in sequential operations rather than random reads and writes. Those systems that require this usage profile should be considering flash-based solutions or using caching to manage those demands, though, as physical drives aren’t inherently suited to random access activity, irrespective of how they’re configured.

The quoted MTBF (mean time between failures) is rated at a million hours, the same as all WD Red series units. That’s 114 years, or more realistically, one drive going down in an eight-drive array every 18 years.

Along with that reliability, what the WD100EFAX offers is acceptable speeds for NAS use, huge capacity and relatively low power consumption, heat and noise output. It isn’t suitable to use in a desktop system as a backup space, where the Red Pro or Gold would be a better option.

Thinking big storage

For IT managers and those responsible for creating RAID storage arrays using devices like the WD Red 10TB, they are both a blessing and yet an entirely new and interesting curse.

On the positive side of the equation, this is technology that allows the construction of monstrous scaled volumes with a relatively small number of drives. And, by definition, there are fewer things to go wrong, and less to worry about.

However, these are SATA connected drives and transferring the contents from a single 10TB WD100EFAX to a replacement would take 12 hours under optimal conditions.

That’s a colossal amount of data to secure and restore should the worst happen, especially if that data is part of a mission-critical system.

Therefore everything needs to be done to make sure a RAID pack built using these drives doesn’t fail. A good resilience plan that includes having hot spares installed and replacement drives on hand is vital.

We should also mention that building an 80TB or larger array using these or similar drives usually involves a surface test that at this scale isn’t an afternoon job. It might well take some days for the system to complete a surface confidence scan and sign off the array as fit for use.

The advantage of these drives over smaller mechanisms is that for the same capacity you have fewer points of failure. Conversely, the workload of each drive is greater, increasing the theoretical likelihood of drive failure and overall reduced lifespan.

There is also a temptation with drives this large to put them in small four or fewer tray NAS boxes, which will work fine. But it is also a huge amount of business data that could easily be lost should someone wish to take it.

A decent level of paranoia is a healthy state of mind for those who don’t wish to explain to their line manager about data loss or downtime.

If 10TB seems plenty of storage, when HAMR technology drives arrive in the not too distant future with 50TB and 60TB mechanisms, the capacity of this drive might seem quaint almost overnight. And the headaches of running servers with Petabytes of capacity will become yet another data management hurdle to clear.

Final verdict

If you need a massive amount of array capacity and want to spend less on drive racks, you’ve got a stark choice between the WD Red 10TB and the Seagate IronWolf 10TB or 12TB options. If it comes down to price this drive wins, but the IronWolf disks are a little quicker. The choice is yours.

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