WD Red NAS 10TB
This capacious NAS-targeted drive has its strengths.
WD Red products range from the now diminutive 750GB WD7500BFCX design up to the monstrous 10TB WD100EFAX reviewed here. These are basic SATA devices designed for reliable performance. The WD Red drive neatly balances speed, operating life, power consumption and error management.
Western Digital has encased all seven 1.42TB platters within a heliumfilled enclosure using technology acquired when it bought HGST. The impact of that might be marginal, as the WD100EFAX only rotates at 5,400RPM.
The quoted internal transfer speed is 210MB/s and that’s almost exactly what our sequential benchmark returned: 210.9 MB/s reads, and 211.1MB/s writes. This is 10 per cent slower than the 7200RPM Seagate IronWolf 10TB.
For IT managers and those responsible for creating RAID storage arrays using devices such as 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 enables the construction of monstrously scaled volumes with a relatively small number of drives. And, by definition, there are fewer things to go wrong, and less to worry about.
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.