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6 Terabyte Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green and Seagate Enterprise 6TB
MojoKid writes The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Since most of us still need a hard drive for bulk storage, the question naturally becomes, "how big of a drive do you need?" For a while, 4TB drives were the top end of what was available in the market but recently Seagate, HGST, and Western Digital announced breakthroughs in areal density and other technologies, that enabled the advent of the 6 Terabyte hard drive. This round-up looks at three offerings in the market currently, with a WD Red 6TB drive, WD Green and a Seagate 6TB Enterprise class model. Though the WD drives only sport a 5400RPM spindle speed, due to their increased areal density of 1TB platters, they're still able to put up respectable performance. Though the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB (also known as the Constellation ES series) drive offers the best performance at 7200 RPM, it comes at nearly a $200 price premium. Still, at anywhere from .04 to .07 per GiB, you can't beat the bulk storage value of these new high capacity 6TB HDDs.
I've seen in general, three lines of HDDs. Basic desktop/laptop drives, premium desktop/laptop, and enterprise grade drives which are designed to all wind up at the same firmware level to minimize issues when in RAID controllers.
However, a "NAS" hard drive? Is this something a step down from enterprise drives, but designed for a device like a Drobo, or some other solution that really doesn't care about background drives, uses RAID 5 or 6, and expects drives to blow out over time?
Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?
Awfully long summary to say "you can haz 6TB HD"
Is anyone with significant amounts of data not caching their frequently accessed data on SSD? Rotational is still about 8x cheaper than SSD these days, but the days of rotational speed for cold data are numbered. Storage is easily abstracted so it's not a legacy concern. A lot of shops I know have already invested in a complete switchover to full-SSD (we're talking racks of SSD) with tape backup.
Even my home file server uses two tiny second gen 64gb SSDs for read/write caching for ~20TB of data. I just buy the cheapest, biggest rotational drive whenever I start running out of room. When the price on those new Seagate 8TB drives (currently $230) drops to under $150 I will probably start swapping out my oldest 2TB drives to avoid having to upgrade the case in this decade.
moox. for a new generation.
Aren't both of those the bottom of the barrel these days?
You'd be nuts to trust your porn stash to a 6TB consumer drive right now. Buy two 4TB drives, and back that stuff up. Give the 6TBs a year or so to see if there are any reliability issues with these capacities, and for the price to drop a bit.
The summary indicates that HDDs have the advantages over SSDs for total capacity and price per bit.
And mentions that SSDs have the advantage in speed.
How about any other criteria?
Specifically, I wonder about reliability. Prior to SSDs coming out, there were rumors that they would not last nearly as long. Wear leveling technology was introduced to try to help combat this idea.
I do understand that those fears did not turn into reality, at least not as badly as what people were fearing.
I'm probably many years behind the times. Is SSD reliability/longevity still lower than the HDD's, or is that no longer true (or is the opposite true nowadays)?
And can we please ban beta, posts by timothy, or posts involving Bennett Haselton? Oh, sorry, that was off-topic. Except that those topics are crucial enough that they really never should be off-topic at this point in time. Ahh, Captcha: disgrace. Now that's relevant.
I don't build a machine these days that doesn't have mirrored hard drives. You realistically can't backup 6TB worth of data, so barring some horrible FS failure (which is rare these days in Linux land) your best bet is RAID1.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Fastest: Seagate.
Best Warranty: Seagate.
Best Cache: WD Red....or the Seagate...the article conflicts between the first two pages.
Cheapest: WD Green.
Seagate notables: Full drive encryption available at a firmware level. AF and Legacy disks are separate models.
WD Red notables: 5400RPM spindle speed.
WD Green notables: None - nothing distinguishable from the Red drive, except a shorter warranty.
Sandra Benchmark results:
Seagate: 167W/168R.
WD Red: 138W/138R.
WD Green: 133W/133R.
Atto results are shown on a messy graph with no clear numbers, but Seagate wins that benchmark as well (albeit with a closer delta).
HD Tune Pro results basically reflect the transfer rates from above. Seek times for the Seagate are 11ms for both write and read, with the WD Red having a 16/17 set of scores and the WD Green being less than an integer higher. Burst rates are again better on the Seagate (276R/304W), with the WD Green being 217/220 and the Red being 217/218.
Crystal mark, basically the same numbers.
Futuremark, prettier graphs with wonderful titles like "video editing" and "importing pictures", with the results a closer race, each drive having its own task at which it wins (even the green). Not much different from the 3TB numbers, and not that much different from each other.
There were no mentions of reliability metrics; presumably none of the disks failed during benchmarking. Consult your usual biases and experience regarding which drive is likely to fail or not - this was strictly a benchmark review, and shockingly, the enterprise-grade drive with the highest rotational speed and biggest cache that costs the most money got the best score.
If you can't figure out what he meant from the context then I think you might want to re-evaluate who the worthless fuck is.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
7 words back of that is "$200" ...so the astute mind would assume $ as the unit referenced.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Reading is hard.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Why benchmark 2013 drives ? Shingled 8TB high reliability drives are here for $260 !
http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/12/seagate-ships-8tb-shingled-hard-drive/
1. I suspect even the author couldn't tell you whether it's .04 to .07 cents or dollars per GiB.
2. By my math it's $279/6144=$0.05 to $479/6144=$0.08 per GiB, not $0.04 to $0.07.
3. Why are we using GiB when hard drive capacities are expressed in GB/TB?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Hey, the S looked like it was crossed out, OK?
Bert
Spindle speed does not matter much, the number of spindles and temperature does. So WD Red is the best choice.
I wonder how those Seagate 8TB Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) perform in a NAS. 33% more capacity for the same price.
Seagates only last about a year.
The very concept of doing RMW on drives at multiple tracks at drive FW level bothers me endlessly.
3. Why are we using GiB [...]
Because we as men romantically prefer men over women.
Well his own username does indicate that he's scum....
Marketing weasels.
Would much rather have RAID6 of 5 2TB drives. Basically would rather have the most drives in the biggest RAID that would allow the lowest price per gigabyte...
I purchased the first 7200rpm disk available to consumers nearly 20 years ago now. The WD Expert, 18gb if I recall.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
I've always hated the performance of disks, big enthusiast primarily because I knew it
was the biggest bottleneck by far.
Fast forward to today and I am utterly bamboozled why people continue to purchase the bastard things. I detest them. They run hotter, cost more, are slightly more likely to fail, are noisier and the performance difference is utterly negligible.
You need only look at any older SSD review, where they include 3x5400rpm disks, 4x7200rpm disks and 5 SSD's - the graph is difficult to read because even the fastest hard disk is vastly slower than the slowest SSD.
We're entering the age now where even mid-to-basic level nerds have a NAS in the home. I'd wager a reasonable portion of people have SSD's in their main machines / laptops and some 'big dumb storage' in the rest of the house, be it USB storage or a NAS. :/
YET HOWEVER,.... when I went to buy new disks last year, in a new size range (5TB) do you think I could find the 5400's? Nope, the fucking 7200's were the first available. Infact this trend has gone on for a few years now. You used to get 5400's in the new size first, then when the tech slightly improved, they'd do the 7200rpm model. This no longer seems the case.
I actively DON'T want 7200rpm disks in my bloody NAS (which is now locked inside my kitchen cupboard, with a fan on it and ventilation door open to keep the damn noise low) My disks managed to hit 57c (134f) because I couldn't find god damn 5400rpm disks, hence the new fan install
7200's are pointless, it's like buying premium grease for the axle of your horse and cart. :/
If you want performance, SSD, if you want space? Big, dumb, slow, cool, quiet 5400rpm disk. If you want to piss away money, 7200rpm disk. Bastard things.
Really wish I didn't completely need to buy disks when I did, only 12 weeks after I got mine, the WD red and greens were out to buy
In conclusion, avoid Toshiba 7200rpm disks, they are not only hot, the bloody spindle motors are noisy to boot.
...or: You can now loose 6TB of your digital life at once. ;--)
Bigger disk needs better backup solution.
I've always relied on density improvements of HDDs to save me when my disks fill up rather than getting rid of junk or archiving museum pieces. Nice to finally see densities improving again as there is only a couple hundred GBs remaining. Only thing that will suck is having to move to GPT/EFI.
Have a rule only a single pair of mirrored disks shall go into a machine and only software raid shall be used based on years of getting burned by worthless hardware controllers and parity based raid schemes.
Machines are only rebooted to install security patches and suspended to ram when not in use. Disk I/O is not a factor at all... more than enough RAM available to cache everything needed to get work done in a daily basis with no noticeable delays of any kind.
Personally so far SSD costs too much, does not offer competitive densities, not suitable for swap partitions, lack deterministic erasure and lingering reliability fears stemming from lower maturity level of memory controllers and supporting electronics.
IMHO serious archives go on tape. However you have to be very serious about it since a couple of hard drives is a lot cheaper than an LTO6 drive and a few tapes - tape doesn't win until you hit large volumes and long timescales.
A ten year old tape you pull out of a box is going to work apart from a tiny fraction of a percentage of the time. A drive - not so likely since the spindle lubricant doesn't last forever and polished surfaces stick via diffusion. A twenty year old tape should have been transcribed years ago but is going to work unless it has got hot or damp in storage. A thirty year old tape is probably brittle and needs to be read with care, but I've sent a couple of dozen off to be transcribed. It was seismic data so file formats that could handle a few bits missing here or there, and errors outside the file headers have little impact due to "stacking" multiple datasets that overlap. However those reels from the early 1980s and late 1970s preserved effectively all the data put on them despite less than ideal storage (a shed in a humid subtropical climate).
Hard drives are not designed to last for a decade in a box. A decade powered up is ironicly likely to result in less dead drives than powered off on a shelf. Tapes don't have to deal with high speeds and are instead designed to last. They die from the substrate getting brittle over decades, the oxide peeling off the tape over decades and magnetised zones on one section of tape magnetising an area on the next loop of tape, once again over decades.
All that said, if you only have 6TB or so to keep, and you don't want to go for a pile of Blueray disks, getting a couple of drives every few years (3? 5? 7?) is a lot more sane than mucking about with tapes.
They have had a few dud models that are not like those drives from 2006 or even 2000.
HDDs are of course faster at the beginning and slow towards the end. Not one graph in several pages of benchmarks showed how these drives compared after the first few gigabytes of storage.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
And how many of these drives protect against bit rot? Protection be built in as standard with Reed-Solomon error correction (magic afaik) or similar.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Reason GiB is used instead of GB was that GB would denote 1024MB, as opposed to 1000MB (and likewise for MB and KB). In the semiconductor memory space, that was fine, but for HDs, manufacturers wanted to mean MB as 1000, as opposed to 1024, and that confused the market. That's why KiB, MiB, GiB et al were all invented. It's a good idea to use them, since lay people ain't gonna start calculating capacities in powers of 2.
.
I have always wanted a data 'black hole' that I could retrieve data from. But it still isn't there. One that does automatic HSM (hierarchical storage management) so you store in on fast devices, it stays there a while, then migrates (automagically) to slower devices, and eventually to 'archival storage' that can be slow to get to.
So far I haven't found an answer I can afford (personally). -- If you know of something, please let me know! --- Think 'net to SSD, to Disk, to slow disk/nas, to tape or optical drives. Tape and optical data still needs to be read and written on occasion to stay fresh (especially tape). Tape also wares out (so do optical media after 50 or so years, tape degrades dramatically after 5). -- also need multiple copies for when one gets 'bit rot' happens.
Commercially I like IBMs Tivoli Storage Management (just because I used it), but that comes at a pretty hefty price, but it works well when set up and tuned correctly.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Harddrives are just a form of slow nonvolative memory, they just wanted to one-up the other with bigger numbers. Now we're stuck with this stupid GB vs GiB crap.
Maybe, but their addressing & data ain't tied to powers of 2 like semiconductor memory is. Which is why you have odd number of GB, like 500GB or 250GB or so on. Not 512GB or 256GB. Hence this trend to GB and GiB. I'm glad that this separate terminology exists - it was annoying when KB meant both 1024 AND 1000.