Tag Archives: NASware

10TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) Hard Disk Drive Review

In this review, we are going to look at the first helium-filled WD Red model – the 10TB WD Red (Lowest Price) NAS drive!

The WD Red Family

The popularity of Network-Attached Storage (NAS) systems has fuelled a surge in demand for large capacity hard disk drives. This interest led Western Digital to create the WD Red NAS-optimised family of hard disk drives.

The WD Red family of NAS-optimised hard disk drives, with storage capacities from 750 GB all the way to 10 TB. Here is a specification comparison of the five key models:

Specifications	10TB WD Red	8TB WD Red	6TB WD Red	5TB WD Red	4TB WD Red
Model	WD100EFAX	WD80EFZX	WD60EFRX	WD50EFRX	WD40EFRX
HelioSeal Technology	Yes	No	No	No	No
Advanced Format Technology	Yes (512-byte emulation)	Yes (512-byte emulation)	Yes (512-byte emulation)	Yes (512-byte emulation)	Yes (512-byte emulation)
Spindle Speed	5400 RPM	5400 RPM	5400 RPM	5400 RPM	5400 RPM
Cache	256 MB SDRAM	128 MB SDRAM	64 MB SDRAM	64 MB SDRAM	64 MB SDRAM
Maximum Read / Write Speed	210 MB/s	178 MB/s	175 MB/s	150 MB/s	147 MB/s
Average Read / Write Power Consumption	5.7 W	6.4 W	5.3 W	4.5 W	4.1 W
Idle Power Consumption	2.8 W	5.2 W	3.4 W	3.3 W	2.7 W
Acoustics (Seek / Idle)	29 dBA / 20 dBA	29 dBA / 20 dBA	28 dBA / 25 dBA	28 dBA / 25 dBA	24 dBA / 23 dBA
MTBF (hours)	1 million	1 million	1 million	1 million	1 million
Rated World Load (Per Year)	180 TB	180 TB	180 TB	180 TB	180 TB
Warranty	3 Years	3 Years	3 Years	3 Years	3 Years

They all share the following common features :

NAS Compatibility – Advanced firmware technology built into every WD Red drive, enables seamless integration, robust data protection and optimal performance for systems operating in NAS and RAID environments.
Exclusive NASware 3.0 Technology – WD’s exclusive NASware 3.0 technology further optimizes the WD Red for the NAS environment, allowing the WD Red to support small NAS systems with up to 8 bays!
3D Active Balance Plus – This enhanced dual-plane balance control technology significantly improves the overall drive performance and reliability. Hard drives that are not properly balanced may cause excessive vibration and noise in a multidrive system, reduce the hard drive lifespan, and degrade the performance over time.[adrotate group=”2″]
Enhanced Reliability – With a 35% MTBF improvement over standard desktop drives, the WD Red drive is designed and manufactured to be a more reliable and robust solution.
Energy Efficient – Innovative technology reduces power consumption and lowers the operating temperature, resulting in a more reliable and affordable solution for always on 24×7 NAS environments.
Premium Support – Exclusively for WD Red drive customers, a free dedicated 24/7 support line is available in English. Other regional support hours vary.
Longer Warranty Coverage – The WD Red drive is backed by a 3-year limited warranty for greater peace of mind.

Now, let’s check out the 10TB WD Red (Lowest Price) hard disk drive!

A Quick Look At The 10TB WD Red

The 10 TB WD Red (Lowest Price) hard disk drive came in a sealed antistatic plastic pack. Notably, it lacked the usual sachet of desiccants. That’s because the drive is hermetically-sealed in the factory, and filled with helium. Also notable is their use of two gold-coloured screws to lock the PCB in place.

To remove the drive, just tear off the top or cut it open, and slide out the drive. Be sure to ground yourself before removing and handling the hard disk drive as static can damage it. In particular, you should try to avoid touching the exposed PCB located on the lower underside of the drive.

Next Page > Key Features, HelioSeal, SATA 6 Gb/s

Support Tech ARP!

If you like our work, you can help support our work by visiting our sponsors, participating in the Tech ARP Forums, or even donating to our fund. Any help you can render is greatly appreciated!

The 10TB WD Red NAS Drive

Despite featuring a hermetically-sealed chassis, the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) drive looks deceptively like any other 3.5″ hard disk drive. In fact, it even sports the same printed label on the top plate, with an uncovered PCB on the underside.

The label has a lot of important information, like the hard disk drive model, storage capacity as well as its date and place of manufacture. This particular drive was manufactured in Thailand on the 1st of April, 2017. You can also see that the drive uses the Advanced Format Technology to achieve its high storage density.

HelioSeal Technology

The 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) NAS-optimised drive is one of the few hard disk drives in the market to feature the revolutionary HGST HelioSeal technology. It is hermetically sealed at the factory, and filled with helium.

Instead of a breather hole that is present in all “air-filled” hard disk drives, it has two sealed ports that are used to extract air from inside the chassis, and replacing it with helium.

Because helium is only 1/7th the density of “regular air”, it allows for less friction conferring the following benefits :

[adrotate group=”2″]

The lower friction reduces the amount of power required to spin the platters, reducing both energy costs and thermal output.
Internal turbulence is greatly reduced, which makes tracking more precise and reliable. This indirectly allows for greater areal density.
The lower power requirement and internal turbulence allow more platters and heads to be added in the same volume of space.
The completely sealed environment eliminates reliability issues that can occur if breather filters get clogged up with dirt.

The only things stopping helium-filled drives from becoming mainstream are the relatively high cost of helium, and the difficulty in sealing the drive.

SATA 6 Gb/s

This is a Serial ATA drive, with native support for SATA 6 Gb/s. However, it is backward-compatible so you will have no problem using it with older SATA 3 Gb/s controllers.

The SATA 6 Gb/s interface is necessary for optimal performance since the 10 TB WD Red (Lowest Price) NAS drive boasts a maximum sustained internal (platter-to-buffer) transfer rate of 210 MB/s, and a large and fast DDR3 SDRAM cache.

Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard disk drive to the server, computer or NAS while it’s still running.

Next Page > Under The PCB, Testing The Drive

Support Tech ARP!

What’s Under The PCB?

Western Digital has a penchant for keeping all surface-mounted components on the reverse side of the PCB – to prevent static damage and to allow for better cooling. The PCB is protected by a thin foam cutout on the chassis side, with a thermal pad to help transfer heat from the HDD controller to the hard disk drive chassis.

Unfortunately, we can’t make out the hard disk drive controller Western Digital used, but we can see that it uses the ST Microelectronics L7232 motor drive controller, which features their proprietary Smooth Drive pseudo-sinusoidal digital drive technology.

The 10 TB WD Red (Lowest Price) NAS drive boasts a large 256 MB SDRAM cache, courtesy of an EtronTech EM6GD16EWXC-12H chip. This is a DDR3-1600 SDRAM chip with 8 memory banks and timings of 11-11-11. This gives it a peak transfer rate of 400 MB/s.

Finally, the 10 TB WD Red (Lowest Price) NAS drive has two shock sensors that allow it to better detect shock and vibration events, and dynamically adjust the flying height of the read/write heads to avoid head crashes.

[adrotate group=”1″]

Testing The 10TB WD Red NAS Drive

Processors	Intel Core i7-2600K
Motherboard	Intel DP67BG
Memory	Four Kingmax 2 GB DDR3-1333 modules
Graphics Card	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
Hard Disk Drives	10 TB Western Digital Red 8 TB Western Digital Gold 6 TB Western Digital Black 6 TB Western Digital Red 6 TB Western Digital Green 4 TB Western Digital Red Pro 4 TB Western Digital Re 4 TB Western Digital Black Gen. 2 4 TB Western Digital Red 3 TB Western Digital Red
Operating System	Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit

Testing Methodology

We tested in both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, with the latest updates. We chose to use IO Meter 2008 as well as our “old faithful”, WinBench 99 2.0, with the following tests :

Platter Data Transfer Profile
Business Disk WinMark 99
High-End Disk WinMark 99
Disk Transfer Rate (Beginning)
Disk Transfer Rate (End)

Business Disk WinMark 99 is a real-world simulation based on three office application suites – Microsoft Office 97, Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect Suite 8, as well as a web browser, Netscape Navigator. They are quite dated, but should still reflect the usage patterns of users in an office environment using such applications. The test runs through a script that keeps multiple applications open, while it performs tasks that switches between those applications and Netscape Navigator. The result is the average transfer rate during the script run.

High-End Disk WinMark 99 is a real-world simulation based on AVS/Express 3.4, FrontPage 98, MicroStation SE, Photoshop 4.0, Premiere 4.2, Sound Forge 4.0 and Visual C++ 5.0. However, it differs by running the applications serially, instead of simultaneously. There are individual results for each application but in this comparison, we will be looking only at the weighted average score, which is the average transfer rate during the tests.

Unfortunately, WinBench 99 is not fully compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, registering a SetFilePointer error in the Disk Access Time test. So, we were not able to obtain any Disk Access Time results.

In addition, it would keep crashing if the hard drive was tested with a single partition. This is likely due to a limit on the size of the partition that is supported by WinBench 99. We came up with a workaround by dividing the hard disk drive into 5 partitions of equal sizes. We then tested each partition individually and averaged the results.

Click to read about our Testing Methodology

Next Page > Usable Capacity, Platter Profile, Operating Temperature

Support Tech ARP!

10 TB WD Red Usable Capacity

The 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) NAS drive has an official formatted capacity of 10 terabytes. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Microsoft Windows 7.

The actual formatted capacity was 10,000,695,029,760 bytes, which is about 695 MB higher than the official storage capacity. With about 494 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity was slightly above 10 TB.

10 TB WD Red Platter Profile

The platter profile of the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) NAS drive was pretty good. There appeared to be some use of replacement sectors, but nothing particularly significant.

We also compared its platter profile to that of the 6TB WD Red, which was the last WD Red drive we reviewed. We can see right away that the 10 TB WD Red (Lowest Price) uses higher density platters, which gave it a very high throughput.

In fact, the outermost tracks of the 6 TB WD Red only equalised the 10 TB WD Red at the 6.5 TB point. Even at its slowest tracks, the 10 TB WD Red was as fast as the 6 TB WD Red at its 5 GB point.

[adrotate group=”1″]

Maximum Surface Temperature

We monitored the surface temperature of seven hard disk drives during their benchmarks. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.

Despite packing 2 additional platters than the 6 TB WD Black, the 10 TB WD Red (Lowest Price) drive was significantly cooler at full load. It ran a little warmer than the 8 TB WD Gold – another helium-filled drive, but was cooler at idle.

This reduced thermal output (and power consumption) is a key advantage of helium-filled hard disk drives like the 10 TB WD Red drive. When used in large NAS systems with up to 8 drives running non-stop, the lower energy costs of running them, and keeping them cool, will be very significant.

Next Page > Transfer Rate Range, WinBench Results

Support Tech ARP!

Transfer Rate Range

This chart shows you the range of platter-to-buffer transfer rates from the innermost track to the outermost track. In other words, it shows you the range of disk transfer rates of the hard disk drives (from minimum to maximum).

The 10 TB WD Red NAS drive has an official peak throughput of 210 MB/s, which was confirmed by our tests. In fact, it actually peaked at 217 MB/s. While it was still slightly slower than the 6 TB WD Black, that puts it ahead of most of its competitors.

Both the 8 TB WD Gold and the 10 TB WD Red have 7 platters. The 10 TB WD Red (Lowest Price) use higher density 1.43 GB platters to compensate for the 8 TB WD Gold‘s higher 7200 RPM spindle speed. This proves yet again that HDD performance is not always about the spindle speed… 😉

Business Disk WinBench 99

Even though it’s not optimised for desktop applications, the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) NAS drive did very well in this benchmark, coming in faster than even the 6 TB WD Black.

Hard Disk Drive Model	Capacity	Business Disk WinMark 99	Difference	Useful Links
Western Digital Red	10 TB	32.5 MB/s	Baseline	–	Lowest $
Western Digital Black	6 TB	26.1 MB/s	– 19.7%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Green	6 TB	25.6 MB/s	– 21.2%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Black	4 TB	24.0 MB/s	– 26.2%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Red Pro	4 TB	23.4 MB/s	– 28.0%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Gold	8 TB	23.3 MB/s	– 28.3%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Re	4 TB	20.4 MB/s	– 37.2%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Red	6 TB	19.4 MB/s	– 40.3%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Red	4 TB	17.5 MB/s	– 46.2%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Red	3 TB	16.1 MB/s	– 50.5%	Review	Lowest $

[adrotate group=”1″]

High-End Disk WinBench 99

The 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) NAS drive was top in this benchmark too, edging out the very fast 6 TB WD Black.

Hard Disk Drive Model	Capacity	High-End Disk WinMark 99	Difference	Useful Links
Western Digital Red	10 TB	150 MB/s	Baseline	–	Lowest $
Western Digital Black	6 TB	143 MB/s	– 4.7%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Green	6 TB	140 MB/s	– 6.7%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Black	4 TB	138 MB/s	– 8.0%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Red Pro	4 TB	137 MB/s	– 8.7%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Gold	8 TB	133 MB/s	– 11.3%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Re	4 TB	121 MB/s	– 19.3%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Red	6 TB	121 MB/s	– 19.3%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Red	4 TB	118 MB/s	– 21.3%	Review	Lowest $
Western Digital Red	3 TB	107 MB/s	– 24.0%	Review	Lowest $

Next Page > IO Meter (Random Access) Performance

Support Tech ARP!

IO Meter (Random Access)

We compared the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) NAS drive to the 6 TB WD Red. For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

Random Throughput

The small random reads and writes are the most important tests for applications that make a lot of random accesses, so those would be key performance indicators for drives that are used as boot or system drives, but not very important for NAS systems.

With the exception of small reads, the 10TB WD Red (Lowest Price) was far superior than the 6 TB WD Red in all other aspects. Most impressively, it was 3X faster at small writes, most likely due to its large, fast cache.

Test	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	27.92 MB/s	18.70 MB/s	+ 49.3%
512 KB Write	31.65 MB/s	20.81 MB/s	+ 52.1%
4 KB Read	0.27 MB/s	0.26 MB/s	+ 3.8%
4 KB Write	0.76 MB/s	0.24 MB/s	+ 216.7%

Random Access Time

Test	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	18.78 ms	28.04 ms	– 33.0%
512 KB Write	16.56 ms	25.19 ms	– 34.2%
4 KB Read	15.24 ms	15.81 ms	– 3.6%
4 KB Write	5.36 ms	17.29 ms	– 69.0%

The access times dropped significantly across the board. The small decrease in the 4KB read access time is more than compensated by the incredibly large decrease in the 4KB write access time.

[adrotate group=”1″]

Random CPU Utilisation

Test	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	28.79 %	0.41 %	+ 6922%
512 KB Write	29.07 %	0.44 %	+ 6507%
4 KB Read	28.83 %	0.38 %	+ 7487%
4 KB Write	28.82 %	0.39 %	+ 7290%

We are not sure what HDD controller Western Digital used for the 10TB WD Red (Lowest Price) NAS drive, but they appeared to have decided to focus on performance at the expense of CPU utilisation. This is not a problem for NAS systems because they have a processor that is dedicated to such operations. Such high CPU utilisation though means the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) would not make for a very good desktop drive.

Next Page > IO Meter Sequential Access Performance

Support Tech ARP!

IO Meter (Sequential Access)

We compared the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) NAS drive to the 6 TB WD Red. For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

Sequential Throughput

Test	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	215.25 MB/s	172.71 MB/s	+ 24.6%
512 KB Write	215.45 MB/s	173.09 MB/s	+ 24.5%
4 KB Read	84.70 MB/s	51.64 MB/s	+ 64.0%
4 KB Write	71.53 MB/s	50.09 MB/s	+ 42.8%

This is the most important test for the NAS drives because it shows their ability to read and write files sequentially. The large sequential transfer performance is particularly important since many NAS system deal with large files (larger than 512 KB in this context).

Without a doubt, the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) is much faster than the 6 TB WD Red in all aspects. The biggest boost was in small sequential reads.

Sequential Access Time

Test	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	2.43 ms	3.03 ms	– 19.8%
512 KB Write	2.43 ms	3.03 ms	– 19.7%
4 KB Read	0.05 ms	0.08 ms	– 39.2%
4 KB Write	0.06 ms	0.08 ms	– 30.0%

[adrotate group=”1″]

Sequential CPU Utilisation

Test	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	29.84 %	0.96 %	+ 3008%
512 KB Write	29.49 %	1.14 %	+ 2487%
4 KB Read	35.77 %	8.52 %	+ 319.8%
4 KB Write	35.17 %	9.15 %	+ 284.4%

Even in sequential accesses, the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) took up an excessive amount of CPU utilisation. Again, this is not a problem for NAS systems, but will be an issue for those who choose to use this drive in their desktop systems.

Next Page > IOPS Scaling (Random) Performance

Support Tech ARP!

IOPS Scaling (Random)

We tested the drive’s ability to tackle multiple input/output operations, comparing the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) to the 6 TB WD Red. For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

Although we don’t know what hard disk drive controller used in the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX), we can see that it is significantly faster than the Marvell 88i1047-NDB2 controller used in the 6 TB WD Red. Its performance was particularly impressive in the 4 KB random write test.

4 KB Random Read

Outstanding I/Os	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
1	66 IOPS	63 IOPS	+ 3.7%
8	112 IOPS	98 IOPS	+ 14.1%
32	142 IOPS	136 IOPS	+ 3.7%

4 KB Random Write

Outstanding I/Os	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
1	186 IOPS	58 IOPS	+ 222.3%
8	192 IOPS	58 IOPS	+ 228.7%
32	186 IOPS	57 IOPS	+ 224.2%

[adrotate group=”1″]

512 KB Random Read

Outstanding I/Os	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
1	53 IOPS	36 IOPS	+ 49.3%
8	72 IOPS	37 IOPS	+ 96.2%
32	76 IOPS	47 IOPS	+ 61.4%

512 KB Random Write

Outstanding I/Os	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
1	59 IOPS	40 IOPS	+ 52.1%
8	57 IOPS	40 IOPS	+ 43.6%
32	60 IOPS	40 IOPS	+ 47.5%

Next Page > IOPS Scaling (Sequential) Performance

Support Tech ARP!

IOPS Scaling (Sequential)

The 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) was much faster than the 6 TB WD Red in all aspects. Its performance was particularly impressive in the 4 KB sequential read test.

4 KB Sequential Read

Outstanding I/Os	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
1	20,680 IOPS	12,608 IOPS	+ 64.0%
8	52,847 IOPS	37,207 IOPS	+ 42.0%
32	52,441 IOPS	36,793 IOPS	+ 42.5%

4 KB Sequential Write

Outstanding I/Os	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
1	17,463 IOPS	12,228 IOPS	+ 42.8%
8	46,286 IOPS	38,668 IOPS	+ 19.7%
32	46,609 IOPS	38,560 IOPS	+ 20.9%

[adrotate group=”1″]

512 KB Sequential Read

Outstanding I/Os	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
1	411 IOPS	329 IOPS	+ 24.6%
8	411 IOPS	329 IOPS	+ 24.8%
32	414 IOPS	329 IOPS	+ 25.5%

512 KB Sequential Write

Outstanding I/Os	WD Red (10 TB)	WD Red (6 TB)	Difference
1	411 IOPS	330 IOPS	+ 24.5%
8	412 IOPS	331 IOPS	+ 24.5%
32	411 IOPS	330 IOPS	+ 24.6%

Next Page > Our Verdict & Award, Full Specifications

Support Tech ARP!

Our Verdict & Award

This is our second review of a helium-filled hard disk drive (after the 8 TB WD Gold), and we continue to be impressed. Even from its specifications alone, we can already see a significant reduction in power consumption and noise levels. These are not minor either.

The 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) boasts 11% lower power consumption than the air-filled WD Red models at peak loads, and an astounding 46% lower power consumption during idle! It accomplished this despite packing 2-4 more platters than the other WD Red drives.

The platters of the 10 TB WD Red (WD100EFAX) still spin at a relatively sedate 5400 RPM, but they have a very high areal density, boasting a storage capacity of 1.43 GB per platter. This high areal density gave it a very high throughput, allowing it to beat even the 8 TB WD Gold, which has a spindle speed of 7200 RPM.

Our benchmarks show that it is one of the fastest hard disk drives in the market, beating even high-performance drives like the 6 TB WD Black. This is very impressive performance for a 5400 RPM drive that is optimised for NAS systems.

The downside though is its high CPU utilisation. This is not a problem if you intend to use it in a relatively new NAS system, but it may be a problem if you pack more than two of them in an old NAS system with a slow processor. The high CPU utilisation will also be an issue if you intend to use this drive in your desktop PC.

Despite the high CPU utilisation, its stellar performance deserves our Reviewer’s Choice Award. Congratulations, Western Digital!

[adrotate group=”1″]

The 10TB WD Red Specifications

Specifications	10 TB WD Red NAS Hard Disk Drive
Model	WD100EFAX
Form Factor	3.5 inch
Platter And Head Count	7 Platters with 14 Read/Write Heads
Advanced Format Technology	Yes (512-byte emulation)
Formatted Capacity	10 TB
Native Command Queuing	Yes
Interface	SATA 6 Gb/s
Spindle Speed	5400 RPM
Sustained read / write performance	210 MB/s (maximum)
Cache	256 MB DDR3-1600 SDRAM
Average Power Consumption	Read / Write : 5.7 W Idle : 2.8 W
Temperature Rating	0 to 65 °C (Operating) -40 to 70 °C (Non-Operating)
Shock Rating	Operating : 65 G (half-sine wave, 2 ms) Non-Operating : 250 G (half-sine wave, 2 ms)
Acoustics	Seek : 29 dBA (average) Idle : 20 dBA
Load / Unload Cycles	600,000
Non-Recoverable Read Errors per Bits Read	<1 in 10¹⁴
MTBF (Maximum Time Before Failure)	1,000,000 hours
Rated Workload (Per Year)	180 TB
Warranty	3 Years
Physical Dimensions	101.6 mm (4.0") wide x 147.0 mm (5.787") long x 26.1 mm (1.028") high
Weight	650 g (1.43 lbs)

Go Back To > First Page | Reviews | Tech ARP

Support Tech ARP!

10TB WD Red & Red Pro Helium-Filled Drives Launched!

10TB WD Red / Red Pro NAS Hard Drive

Designed with Western Digital’s HelioSeal helium-technology, the 10TB WD Red (Lowest Price) hard disk drive provides higher capacity and performance to meet the increasing storage needs of always-on, single-to-8-bay NAS systems. The helium-based design enables a 25% capacity increase from the 8TB WD Red NAS storage drive.

With support for up to 16 bays in tower- and rack-based systems, the 10TB WD Red Pro (Lowest Price) hard disk drive delivers the same high performance, reliability and capacity to systems operating in up to 16 bay NAS systems. Here are their key features and specifications of the 10 TB WD Red / WD Red Pro drives :

HelioSeal: Bringing Western Digital’s fourth generation, exclusive HelioSeal technology in 10TB capacity to the NAS storage market
3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology that improves overall drive performance and reliability
Seamless integration with Western Digital’s My Cloud Pro Series NAS and My Cloud Expert Series NAS systems designed specifically for the creative community to enable seamless transfer of content between devices in any location, whether users are shooting remotely or editing at home
NASware 3.0, an enhanced version of WD’s original NASware technology, designed to improve reliability and system performance, reduce customer downtime and to simplify the integration process
Optimized performance class – 5400 RPM class for SOHO environments, 7200 RPM class for up to 16 bay NAS systems

The 10TB WD Red (Lowest Price) and 10TB WD Red Pro (Lowest Price) drives are finalizing compatibility testing with a number of leading NAS system providers.

[adrotate group=”2″]

Price & Availability

The new 10TB WD Red (Lowest Price) and 10TB WD Red Pro (Lowest Price) hard disk drives are available in July at selected retailers and distributors.

The 10TB WD Red (model #: WD100EFAX) hard disk drives feature a three-year limited warranty and a RM 2,249 (inclusive of GST) / ~US$ 539 manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Get the lowest price here!

The 10TB WD Red Pro (model #: WD101KFBX) hard disk drives feature a five-year limited warranty and a RM 2,449 (inclusive of GST) / ~US$ 589 MSRP. Get the lowest price here!

Go Back To > News | Home

Support Tech ARP!

5 Reasons To Only Use NAS-Optimised Drives In Your NAS

4 Replies

Network-attached storage (NAS) drives provide fast and secure storage for backup files, or a central repository of shared files that everyone can access. As NAS drives are available 24/7, they offer the convenience of on-call access to data with minimal power consumption. That is why they are now a necessity in many businesses and even homes.

When NAS systems first became popular, they were built around normal desktop drives which were not designed for 24/7 operation. This led to poor performance and reliability. To address this, Western Digital developed the WD Red family of NAS hard disk drives.

Let us show you why you must use NAS-optimised drives like the WD Red drives for your NAS systems, instead of regular hard disk drives.

Reason #1 : Tougher, Cooler & Quieter

Desktop drives are designed to run as solitary drives, so they do not need much protection against vibration. Neither do they need to be particularly quiet or cool. When installed in a NAS enclosure, the vibration and heat from multiple drives running in close proximity greatly reduce their reliability and lifespan, while testing your tolerance for noise.

WD Red drives are designed to run cooler and vibrate less. They also come with technologies that offer better protection against vibration, like 3D Active Balance Plus. That’s why you can pack up to 8 WD Red drives (or 16 WD Red Pro drives) in a NAS enclosure without worrying about killing them… or your eardrums!

Reason #2 : 24/7 Reliability

Desktop drives are also not designed to run 24/7. WD Red drives, on the other hand, are specifically designed for the “always-on” environment of a NAS enclosure.

Just how reliable are WD Red drives? The latest WD Red drives that feature the NASware 3.0 firmware are rated for a MTBF (mean time before failure) of 1 million hours. If you buy 8 of these drives and run them 24/7, you will likely see a single drive fail only after 14 years of non-stop operation.

That’s why Western Digital backs up their WD Red drives with a 3-year warranty. Their higher-end WD Red Pro drives (which support up to 16 drives in a single NAS enclosure) come with a 5-year warranty.

Reason #3 : Optimised For NAS

The performance requirements for network storage is vastly different from that of a desktop computer. Desktop drives will see a rough 50-50 mix of read and write operations over time, and their firmware are designed to support simultaneous read and write operations.

NAS drives, however, will experience far more reads than writes. After all, when you share files (family holiday photos, for example), they are written once but read many times after that. That is why WD Red drives are optimised for a mix of 80% reads and 20% writes.

[adrotate banner=”5″]

Reason #4 : Testing, Testing, Testing

WD Red drives are extensively tested with most, if not all, of the NAS systems in the world. WD Red drives also undergo more extensive reliability tests than regular desktop drives. All these tests not only ensure compatibility out-of-the-box, they also ensure the drives run reliably in the more demanding NAS environment.

Reason #5 : RAID-Optimised

Regular desktop drives are not designed to be used as RAID drives, and lack the RAID error recovery control called TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery). TLER is designed to increase the reliability and stability of the RAID array. WD Red drives, on the other hand, support TLER because they are designed to be configured as RAID drives.

WD Red Drives

In July 2012, Western Digital revealed the world’s first NAS-optimised hard disk drive designed to run 24/7 – the 3 TB WD Red (WD30EFRX). Since then, they have released many new WD Red drives to meet the high demand for NAS-optimised storage :

[adrotate banner=”4″]

Irrespective of which brand you choose to use, understand this – you must use NAS-optimised hard disk drives in your NAS. Your data depends on it!