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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.
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.
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.
6TB isn't ready for the serious archives, who, by my own subjective definition, only purchases drives warranted for 5 years. It's still $160 or so for a 4TB like that.
TL;DR: Once you go WD Black you never go back.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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.
Having experienced SSD failures.. NO you cant read from them. SSD drives do a catastrophic failure, you do not get a chance to read from them before full failure, they just do a complete fail and all data is gone forever.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hey, the S looked like it was crossed out, OK?
Bert
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?
I always thought that the NAS/RAID drives allowed Time Limited Error Recovery to be specified, which would prevent RAID controllers from interpreting a long error recovery interval as a drive timeout and erroring out that drive and removing it from the array. The NAS and Enterprise drives do allow this option to be set.
And you'd trust your data to a first-gen drive technology? Backups are great and all, but it's still a hassle. I've been burned by enough cutting edge hardware already, I'll let the IT departments deal with the teething pains. I'll be waiting for at least v1.1, maybe 2.1, before I'm tempted by a marginal up-front cost reduction.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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?
Pretty much yes. The Red have better vibration tolerance, and the firmware is tweaked to fit a NAS workload better. For example, a Green will park the head as quickly as it can which for always-on machines can lead to a Green disk reaching its "Load/Unload Cycle" tolerance in months and die prematurely. The Red will not do this.
There's also a difference in how they handle unreadable sectors and such errors which makes the Red play nicer with hardware RAID controllers. An unrecoverable read error in a Green can cause the whole array to go down.
Once the electrons are out of the gate, the data is -gone-. No amount of recovery is going to do the job, ever.
This is my biggest concern with SSDs. Yes, they can have a longer MTBF, but when they go, they take your data with it, making backups more imperative.
The ironic thing? Since SSDs make the need for backups that much more urgent [1] We have far fewer tools for backup than we did on PCs 20 years ago (when an average user could get a desktop tape drive, a ZIP drive, removable SCSI hard disk, or other media.) For non-enterprise backups, we have external hard disks, USB flash drives, and offsite file servers [2]. Even optical drives are becoming uncommon. External hard disks and USB flash drives are not archival media. They -might- hold their data, but are not warrantied for it.
It would be nice if some company could make an appliance that did a disk-to-disk-to-removable-media appliance. The backup program would copy data to the device, and data would stay on a set of RAID protected HDDs, as well as eventually copied to removable media [3]. A bare metal restore would be easy -- if the appliance is connected via USB, have it present a DVD-ROM with the OS or recovery software. If on a LAN, have a USB flash drive or image that would get a machine booted enough to find the appliance and start a restore.
[1]: With HDDs, a recovery from a format isn't too difficult. SSDs usually follow up a format with a TRIM command, zeroing (or more exactly, writing 1s) to all the blocks, either right then, or as the drive feels like it. "Unformatting" a SSD is pretty much impossible with a modern OS that does proper TRIM commands. Add a decently smart encryption system like BitLocker that zeroes out the sectors with master volume keys multiple times, and it can almost be assured that a delete or a format results in data forever gone.
[2]: Cloud storage seems like a working idea, but it can take a good while to fetch lost documents and rebuild the entire OS and machine. With a local backup solution, most backup programs offer a simple bare-metal restore, no Internet access needed. There is also the fact that a machine needs to have the OS, updates, and the cloud provider's software loaded and logged in before a restore can happen. Having the OS local means a complete bare metal restore is a "press 'restore' and walk off" action.
[3]: Tape comes to mind. The main advantage of tape (or offline media in general) is that some hacker who gets access to the SAN controller can't just purge all media with a single command. A lot of companies have excellent replication of SAN data, but that replication will happily replicate the "delete everything, including all snapshots" as well. Plus, tapes can be physically set read-only where only a reflash of the tape drive could allow the cartridge to be written to. I wish someone could make a consumer level tape drive, perhaps using a SSD as a buffer to prevent shoe-shining. There is a Thunderbolt based tape drive for Macs by mTape for $3699. If someone made a product like this (but a price more palatable to consumers) that could tolerate USB 3 (or maybe even USB 2), and work well under Windows, Linux, and other operating systems, they might have a best seller. Especially with the fact that intruders now have moved from just accessing data to actively modifying and destroying it, so backups are even more crucial than they were before this year.
In fact, I'd say that with the ease data is permanently destroyed, a consumer level backup appliance might be quite a seller.
The main difference is the WD RED drives will error out quickly from an unrecoverable read error where as a typical desktop drive will retry the read, up to a minute, yes, a minute worth of retries which will confuse most RAID controllers into thinking the drive is bad (i.e. gone offline) and forcing an array rebuild. The idea being if you're not running RAID, it is okay to go through heroic efforts trying to trace difference paths over the track to get one good read out of the data before marking the sector bad.
Of course, if you're running RAID, the best thing is to fail the read quickly and rebuild the sector from parity.
They are mechanically better.
Can you provide a citation for that?
But they lack specific mechanical features of enterprise drives that are meant to deal with vibrational issues related to having a large number of drives in a single enclosure.
Wouldn't that make "enterprise" drives more reliable? Except, actual data shows that they are NOT more reliable. So maybe "enterprise drive" is just a BS marketing term to separate fools from their money, and that is why everyone that has actually looked at the facts, such as Google, Facebook, etc. doesn't waste their money on them.
BINGO
The underlying issues with flash can be and are successfully hidden by the controllers in modern SSDs for most workloads (very heavy write loads can be problematic) but that hiding comes at a price. The firmware in a SSD is far more complex than an a HDD and so for a given level of engineering effort it will be less reliable. In particular i've noticed corruption after unclean shutdown to a far greater extent on SSDs than HDDs.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.