6 TB NAS Drives: WD Red, Seagate Enterprise Capacity and HGST Ultrastar He6 Face-Off
by Ganesh T S on July 21, 2014 11:00 AM EST
Introduction and Testbed Setup
The SMB / SOHO / consumer NAS market has been experiencing rapid growth over the last few years. With declining PC sales and increase in affordability of SSDs, hard drive vendors have scrambled to make up for the deficit and increase revenue by targeting the NAS market. The good news is that the growth is expected to accelerate in the near future (thanks to increasing amounts of user-generated data through the usage of mobile devices).
Back in July 2012, Western Digital began the trend of hard drive manufacturers bringing out dedicated units for the burgeoning SOHO / consumer NAS market with the 3.5" Red hard drive lineup. The firmware was tuned for 24x7 operation in SOHO and consumer NAS units. 1 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB versions were made available at launch. Later, Seagate also jumped into the fray with a hard drive series carrying similar firmware features. Over the last two years, the vendors have been optimizing the firmware features as well as increasing the capacities. On the enterprise side, hard drive vendors have been supplying different models for different applications, but all of them are quite suitable for 24x7 NAS usage. For example, the WD Re and Seagate Constellation ES are tuned for durability under heavy workloads, while the WD Se and Seagate Terascale units are targeted towards applications where scalability and capacity are important.
Usually, the enterprise segment is quite conservative when it comes to capacity, but datacenter / cloud computing requirements have resulted in capacity becoming a primary factor to ward off all-flash solutions. HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, was the first vendor to bring a 6 TB hard drive to the market. The sealed Helium-filled HDDs could support up to seven disks (instead of the five usually possible in air-filled units), resulting in a bump up to 6 TB in the same height as traditional 3.5" drives. Seagate adopted a six-platter design for the Enterprise Capacity v4 6 TB version. Today, Western Digital launched the first NAS-specific 6 TB drive targeting SOHO / home consumers, the WD Red 6 TB. In expanding their Red portfolio, WD provides us an opportunity to see how the 6 TB version stacks up against other offerings targeting the NAS market.
The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this review, we will discuss some of these aspects while evaluating three different hard drives targeting the NAS market:
- Western Digital Red 6 TB [ WDC WD60EFRX-68MYMN0 ]
- Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4 6 TB [ ST6000NM0024-1HT17Z ]
- HGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB [ HUS726060ALA640 ]
Each of these drives target slightly different markets. While the WD Red is mainly for SOHO and home consumers, the Seagate Enterprise Capacity targets ruggedness for heavy workloads while the HGST Ultrastar aims for data centers and cloud storage applications with a balance of performance and power efficiency.
Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology
Unlike our previous evaluation of 4 TB drives, we managed to obtain enough samples of the new drives to test them in a proper NAS environment. As usual, we will start off with a feature set comparison of the three drives, followed by a look at the raw performance when connected directly to a SATA 6 Gbps port. In the same PC, we also evaluate the performance of the drive using some aspects of our direct attached storage (DAS) testing methodology. For evaluation in a NAS environment, we configured three drives in a RAID-5 volume and processed selected benchmarks from our standard NAS review methodology.
We used two testbeds in our evaluation, one for benchmarking the raw drive and DAS performance and the other for evaluating performance when placed in a NAS unit.
| AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration | |
| Motherboard | Asus Z97-PRO Wi-Fi ac ATX |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-4790 |
| Memory |
Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY32GX3M4A2133C11 32 GB (4x 8GB) DDR3-2133 @ 11-11-11-27 |
| OS Drive | Seagate 600 Pro 400 GB |
| Optical Drive | Asus BW-16D1HT 16x Blu-ray Write (w/ M-Disc Support) |
| Add-on Card | Asus Thunderbolt EX II |
| Chassis | Corsair Air 540 |
| PSU | Corsair AX760i 760 W |
| OS | Windows 8.1 Pro |
| Thanks to Asus and Corsair for the build components | |
In the above testbed, the hot swap bays of the Corsair Air 540 have to be singled out for special mention.
They were quite helpful in getting the drives processed in a fast and efficient manner for benchmarking. For NAS evaluation, we used the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP. This is very similar to the unit we reviewed last year, except that we have a slightly faster CPU, more RAM and support for both SATA and SAS drives.
The NAS setup itself was subjected to benchmarking using our standard NAS testbed.
| AnandTech NAS Testbed Configuration | |
| Motherboard | Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual LGA2011 SSI-EEB |
| CPU | 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630L |
| Coolers | 2 x Dynatron R17 |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL (8x8GB) CAS 10-10-10-30 |
| OS Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
| Secondary Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
| Tertiary Drive | OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88 (1.6TB PCIe SSD) |
| Other Drives | 12 x OCZ Technology Vertex 4 64GB (Offline in the Host OS) |
| Network Cards | 6 x Intel ESA I-340 Quad-GbE Port Network Adapter |
| Chassis | SilverStoneTek Raven RV03 |
| PSU | SilverStoneTek Strider Plus Gold Evolution 850W |
| OS | Windows Server 2008 R2 |
| Network Switch | Netgear ProSafe GSM7352S-200 |
Thank You!
We thank the following companies for helping us out with our NAS testbed:
- Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E5-2630L CPUs and the ESA I-340 quad port network adapters
- Thanks to Asus for the Z9PE-D8 WS dual LGA 2011 workstation motherboard
- Thanks to Dynatron for the R17 coolers
- Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsZ 64GB DDR3 DRAM kit
- Thanks to OCZ Technology for the two 128GB Vertex 4 SSDs, twelve 64GB Vertex 4 SSDs and the OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88
- Thanks to SilverStone for the Raven RV03 chassis and the 850W Strider Gold Evolution PSU
- Thanks to Netgear for the ProSafe GSM7352S-200 L3 48-port Gigabit Switch with 10 GbE capabilities.
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sleewok - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Based on my experience with the WD Red drives I'm not surprised you had one fail that quickly. I have a 5 disk (2TB Red) RAID6 setup with my Synology Diskstation. I had 2 drives fail within a week and another 1 within a month. WD replaced them all under warranty. I had a 4th drive seemingly fail, but seemed to fix itself (I may have run a disk check). I simply can't recommend WD Red if you want a reliable setup.Zan Lynx - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
If we're sharing anecdotal evidence, I have two 2TB Reds in a small home server and they've been great. I run a full btrfs scrub every week and never find any errors.Child mortality is a common issue with electronics. In the past I had two Seagate 15K SCSI drives that both failed in the first week. Does that mean Seagate sucks?
icrf - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I had a lot of trouble with 3 TB Green drives, had 2 or 3 early failures in an array of 5 or 6, and one that didn't fail, but silently corrupted data (ZFS was good for letting me know about that). Once all the failures were replaced under warranty, they all did fine.So I guess test a lot, keep on top of it for the first few months or year, and make use of their pretty painless RMA process. WD isn't flawless, but I'd still use them.
Anonymous Blowhard - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
>early failure>Green drives
Completely unsurprised here, I've had nothing but bad luck with any of those "intelligent power saving" drives that like to park their heads if you aren't constantly hammering them with I/O.
Big ZFS fan here as well, make sure you're on ECC RAM though as I've seen way too many people without it.
icrf - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I'm building a new array and will use Red drives, but I'm thinking of going btrfs instead of zfs. I'll still use ECC RAM. Did on the old file server.spazoid - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Please stop this "ZFS needs ECC RAM" nonsense. ZFS does not have any particular need of ECC RAM that every other filer doesn't.Anonymous Blowhard - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I have no intention of arguing with yet another person who's totally wrong about this.extide - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
You both are partially right, but the fact is that non ECC RAM on ANY file server can cause corruption. ZFS does a little bit more "processing" on the data (checksums, optional compression, etc) which MIGHT expose you to more issues due to bit flips in memory, but stiff if you are getting frequent memory errors, you should be replacing the bad stick, good memory does not really have frequent bit errors (unless you live in a nuclear power station or something!)FWIW, I have a ZFS machine with a 7TB array, and run scrubs at least once a month, preferably twice. I have had it up and running in it's current state for over 2 years and have NEVER seen even a SINGLE checksum error according to zpool status. I am NOT using ECC RAM.
In a home environment, I would suggest ECC RAM, but in a lot of cases people are re-using old equipment, and many times it is a desktop class CPU which won't support ECC, which means moving to ECC ram might require replacing a lot of other stuff as well, and thus cost quite a bit of money. Now, if you are buying new stuff, you might as well go with an ECC capable setup as the costs aren't really much more, but that only applies if you are buying all new hardware. Now for a business/enterprise setup yes, I would say you should always run ECC, and not only on your ZFS servers, but all of them. However, most of the people on here are not going to be talking about using ZFS in an enterprise environment, at least the people who aren't using ECC!
tl/dr -- Non ECC is FINE for home use. You should always have a backup anyways, though. ZFS by itself is not a backup, unless you have your data duplicated across two volumes.
alpha754293 - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
The biggest problem I had with ZFS is its total lack of data recovery tools. If your array bites the dust (two non-rotating drives) on a stripped zpool, you're pretty much hosed. (The array won't start up). So you can't just do a bit read in order to recover/salvage whatever data's still on the magnetic disks/platters of the remaining drives and the're nothing that has told me that you can clone the drive (including its UUID) in its entirety in order to "fool" the system thinking that it's the EXACTLY same drive (when it's actually been replaced) so that you can spin up the array/zpool again in order to begin the data extraction process.For that reason, ZFS was dumped back in favor of NTFS (because if an NTFS array goes down, I can still bit-read the drives, and salvage the data that's left on the platters). And I HAD a Premium Support Subscription from Sun (back when it was still Sun), and even they TOLD me that they don't have ANY data recovery tools like that. And they couldn't tell me the procedure for cloning the dead drives either (including its UUID).
Btrfs was also ruled out for the same technical reasons. (Zero data recovery tools available should things go REALLY farrr south.)
name99 - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
"because if an NTFS array goes down, I can still bit-read the drives, and salvage the data that's left on the platters"Are you serious? Extracting info from a bag of random sectors was a reasonable thing to do from a 1.44MB floppy disk, it is insane to imagine you can do this from 6TB or 18 TB or whatever of data.
That's like me giving you a house full of extremely finely shredded then mixed up paper, and you imaging you can construct a million useful documents from it.