WD Red Pro 6 TB Review - High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump

62 Comments

View All Comments

• jragonsoul - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link

  I have used a few Red as storage drives before. Liking the 6TB bump.

• Samus - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link

  It's all I use for server storage drives. Haven't had one fail. All the models I've ever deployed are 1TB and 2TB drives. It's amazing how these modern hard disks are somewhat competitive with low-end SSD's (aside from access time)

• leexgx - Wednesday, October 21, 2015 - link

  funny as i did not realize i had a backblaze HDD it is i accuity have the ST31500341AS drive in my system right now (1300 days power on time 7500 stop start count due to HDD power save spin down)
  and its failing slowly bad sectors are racking up and "reported uncorrectable errors" are now starting to happen (not gone up from when i started copying the data to a WD RED 4TB same 1607) don't think i lost any data itself as "read error rate" and "hardware ECC recovered" are still the same (not that the stuff on it is that important to lose any way) just 70 extra relocations in last day meant it was time to copy data to another drive

• imaheadcase - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link

  Streaming Not Supported Not Supported
  
  What does that even mean?

• ganeshts - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link

  We covered the meanings of those table entries in a previous review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7258/battle-of-the-4...
  
  

  
  ... NCQ streaming feature which enables isochronous data transfers for multimedia streams while also improving performance of lower priority transfers. This feature could be very useful for media server and video editing use-cases....
  

• A55A551N 11B2P - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

  so you're saying that the WD Red PRO's wouldn't be good for a central media server with up to 6 clients?

• ddriver - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link

  Judging by consumer reviews, HGST Deskstar seems to have the upper hand when it comes to reliability.

• Souka - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link

  I've got a pair of WD 1TB Re drives in my NAS... full, so been wanting to put a pair of 4TB or 6TB drives in.... the WD Reds would be great, except I'm also seeing a lot of issues.
  
  Granted, not bad as the Seagate drives!
  Source: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

• Samus - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link

  I really don't recommend you follow backblaze statistics. They are collected under one use-case: cold storage. It's also important to note that all of their drives are consumer drives that lack firmware to change the harmonic vibration in cases with that many (72!!) drives. Most consumer drives are rated for installation in cases for 2-8 drives, with enterprise drives rated for up to 16 drives per chassis. Real data centers don't use pods like backblaze (who make their own) because no matter how you dampen the vibrations, these drives are not engineered to work in a large chassis together.
  
  All their data shows is Seagate drives suck as vibration resistance, with WD being slightly better and Hitachi cleaning the show. You know why? WD Red models and ALL Hitachi drives have the platter shaft locked at the TOP of the drive case; Seagate drives just have the shaft locked at the motor (bottom axis) which is for the most part adequate as long as vibration isn't an issue. This makes the drives cheaper, quieter, cooler and more efficient, and entirely adequate for consumer applications.

• Souka - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link

  Cool info, thanks!
  
  I'm not too worried though since my NAS is running Raid-1 Drive fails, RMA it. In 3-5years I'll likely either upgrade/replace the drives and/or get a new NAS+drives