WD Red 8TB 3.5 Inch NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM - WD80EFAX

Product Information

Unrecoverable Read Errors: Its unit is usually bits and it refers to every time how many bits of data are read from the hard disk, there may be an error that cannot be corrected. It is one of the most important parameters for evaluating the stability of the hard disk. The RPM of the two hard drives was very similar. The appearance was also not a factor that we took into consideration as it wasn’t a product we would be looking at. When installing the Seagate IronWolf and the WD Red, we thought they were both straightforward as long as you have the right equipment. Both worked very well, even with up to 8 bays in use. Compatibility: Unlike desktop drives, WD Red Plus hard drives are specifically designed and tested for NAS and include NASware™ technology which fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads for optimum performance.

The WD Red 8TB model is a great addition to Western Digital’s Red line, building sealed drive technology into a well known platform to deliver a compelling overall value proposition. The Seagate IronWolf and the WD Red are able to connect up to 8 bays. They are powerful hard drives that are designed to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Both are suitable for home use and small businesses. Workload Rate

Storage solution

Load/Unload Cycles: It refers to the number of times the head moves in/out of the hard disk when powered on. This factor has nothing to do with the hard drive failure, but it will affect hard drive lifespan. Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes four profiles based on real-world tasks. These profiles have been developed to make it easier to compare to our past benchmarks as well as widely-published values such as max 4k read and write speed and 8k 70/30.

Western Digital partners with a wide range of NAS system vendorsAlthough the WD Red drives performed well with write functions in the iSCSI configuration of our 8k sequential benchmark (18,227 IOPS), it fells short with read functions (16,340 IOPS). The Seagate Enterprise NAS drives posted the highest read performance (30,677 IOPS). NAS hard drives are hard drives designed specifically for NAS. In general, NAS hard drives with the same capacity are much more expensive than desktop hard drives, because NAS drives will adopt some unique designs, for example, NAS hard drives are heat-resistant and vibration-resistant, and can be read and written continuously for several weeks. We saw consistent results in the CIFS configuration of our average latency benchmark, with the WD Red drives performing slightly slower than the others and the Seagate NAS drives performing slightly faster. Once again, the results were similar when the drives were configured in iSCSI; although the numbers were close, the WD Red drives (98.35ms read and 173.3ms write) were outperformed by the Seagate NAS drives (80.2ms read and 155.5ms write).

In our latency benchmark (iSCSI), the WD Red drives were slightly behind the others in terms of average latency, although there was only a slight difference in performance across the board. Reliability: Desktop drives aren’t typically designed for the demands of an always-on NAS environment. WD Red Plus hard drives are designed to perform under tough conditions encountered in high-intensity 24x7 multi-user NAS environments. Western Digital’s exclusive NASware™ technology fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads which helps increase performance and reliability.

Customer reviews

Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. WD Red Pro 22TB hard drives feature Western Digital’s proprietary OptiNAND™ technology which leverages integrated iNAND embedded flash to perform key housekeeping functions, freeing up more capacity and improving the overall drive performance. Compatibility: Unlike desktop drives, WD Red Pro hard drives are specifically designed and tested for NAS and include NASware™ technology which fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads for optimum performance. Western Digital has expanded their Red line to include an 8TB model, increasing the maximum capacity of 8-bay NAS units to 64TB so that SOHO users can get even more out of their initial server investment. WD is using their HelioSeal helium-technology to get the higher capacity much like the HGST Ultrastar Helium Drives. WD Reds still make use of NASware 3.0, which Western Digital originally released alongside the 6TB model to expand drive compatibility, allowing users to load Red drives into 8-bay servers (they were previously only recommended up to 5 bays). NASware 3.0 also improved the reliability and performance of Red drives, optimizing them for NAS environments in which downtime can be devastating. The one area that the Seagate IronWolf did excel was with the drive health monitoring. It was very handy being able to keep an eye on how the hard drive is working.