WD Red 4TB 3.5 Inch NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM - WD40EFAX

Product Information

They may or may not be SMR. WD submarined SMR drives into their 'Red' line starting a couple of years ago. So if your drives are several years old, there's a chance that they're CMR. Do they have similar serial numbers? I won't mention that it's IMO a bad idea to have all your drives out of the same production run, but you may only need to test one.

Prior to beginning this sequence of tests, the drives were prepped by having 3TB of data written to them, and then 1TB of that data is deleted. Testing commenced immediately after the drive prep was completed. First, a simple 125GB file copy to test sequential write speeds outside of the context of a benchmark utility. Following that, CrystalDiskMark was used to see if the large sequential write from the first test would have an lasting impact on the drive performance. These tests were performed as rapidly as possible to minimize drive idle time between them. Finally, a FreeNAS RAIDZ resilver was performed. Looking at max latency, there wasn’t really a clear winner in our 8K 70/30 test, with most drives trading positions across our different thread/queue levels. According to iXsystems, WD Red SMR drives running firmware revision 82.00A82 can cause the drive to enter a failed state during heavy loads using ZFS. This is the revision of firmware that came on both of our drives. We did not experience this failure mode, and instead only received extremely poor performance. Perhaps that was because we were testing the use of the drive as a replacement rather than building an entire array of SMR drives. In either case, we suggest not using them.

The standard deviation chart further highlights the strong performance at a thread count of two and queue of sixteen. Otherwise, the Red 4TB does not stand out among the comparables but does consistently outperform the Seagate NAS 4TB and the Red 3TB. In PCMark8, the WD40EFAX manages to outperform the CMR WD40EFRX. The SMR drive has a much larger cache than the CMR version, 256MB vs 64MB, which perhaps helps account for the win here. In these kinds of shorter burst activity workloads, one can see how SMR may be used as a substitute. there is a much more accurate method of comparing two same PN disks for the same S/C Magnetic recording technology, The 4K maximum latency benchmark is the first place the Red 4TB distinguishes itself: a 4,799ms maximum read latency is the lowest among comparables. Its 5,012ms maximum write latency represents the middle of the road. In the second half of this review, we show the performance of both the new 3.5″ WD Red 4TB and the 2.5″ WD Red 1TB HDD. WD supplied StorageReview with 5 samples of both new drives, which we configured in RAID5 in our Synology DiskStation DS1513+. Leveraging SMB/CIFS shares we show how well a 50GB test sample size performed on each storage array we created.

Unfortunately, while the SMR WD Red performed respectably in the previous benchmarks, the RAIDZ resilver test proved to be another matter entirely. While all three CMR drives comfortably completed the resilver in under 17 hours, the SMR drive took nearly 230 hours to perform an identical task. WD40EFAX FreeNAS Resilver Next, we will move on to the tests focused on the WD40EFAX and NAS RAID arrays. WD Red SMR v. CMR Part II: The Not So Good Transmita, realice copias de seguridad y comparta su contenido digital con un disco WD Red® con la tecnología NAS en su oficina personal o doméstica con entorno NAS.Error recovery controls: WD Red™ NAS hard drives are specifically designed with RAID error recovery control to help reduce failures within the NAS system. This change of mind return policy is in addition to, and does not affect your rights under the Australian Consumer Law including any rights you may have in respect of faulty items. To return faulty items see our Returning Faulty Items policy. It is important to choose a drive purpose-built for RAID-optimized NAS systems to ensure optimum performance and preserve your valuable data. Take the following into consideration when choosing a hard drive for your NAS: The WD Red 4TB is again weak in the same sections of the two-thread web server maximum latency test where it performs well in terms of throughput, but otherwise puts in a consistent performance throughout this maximum latency profile. Switching our focus from peak latency to latency consistency in our standard deviation test, the 1TB 2.5″ Red and previous-generation 3TB 3.5″ Red slightly edged out the other models under more stressful conditions.