Price / Where to Buy:
US – Approx. US$336 – WD Red 8TB
PH – Php15900
WD has introduced their 8TB Red line of drives earlier in the year making them the first 8TB drives for WD along with their surveillance-oriented brothers, the WD Purple. These drives are application-specific with both intended for SOHO and SME environments, allowing larger storage for growing demands e.g. 64TB for 8-bay NAS devices giving you more data real-estate in single appliances. These new WD 8TB drives feature HelioSeal helium-technology allowing for much larger capacities.
As we’ve detailed in our WD Drive Selection Guide, there’s plenty to consider when choosing a hard drive. Sure, the differences might be minimal in terms of overall functions but the importance is like stating the importance of zippers in pants. They have one function but they’re a key component. The same goes for hard drives, while they can do without the features that the WD Red offers and standalone as a storage element in your appliance, you’d lost the benefit of specific technologies intended to improve not only performance but reliability of these drives in their intended applications.
WD NASware 3.0 is still integrated with the WD Red drives extending their compatibility and functionality up to 8-bay NAS systems. The WD Red drives offer significant advantage in these scenarios because they were designed to operate with less heat, compensate for vibration and maintain significant read improvements over their vanilla desktop counterpart. With that said, we take a closer look at the WD Red 8TB helium-filled hard drive. Read on!
Related: How To Choose the Best WD Hard Drive
Features
- Specifically designed for use in NAS systems with up to 8 bays
- Tested for 24×7 reliability
- Built for optimum NAS compatibility
- Premium support and a 3-year limited warranty
- Small and home office NAS systems in a 24×7 environment
PERFORMANCE TESTING
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7 4790K 4.6Ghz
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus VII GENE
Memory: Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3-2133 32GB
Storage: WD Red 8TB
PSU: BitFenix FURY 650G
Potential Performance
ATTO Disk Benchmark benchmarks a drive’s read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them.
Potential Write Performance
For potential write testing, HD Tune was used to measure the drive’s write performance. Again, we focus on the average results for real-world relevance.
Crystal DiskMark
Crystal Disk Mark is storage benchmarking software was developed by “hiyohiyo” of Japan, and is available for free. Crystal Disk Mark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.
Real-world Test: File Transfer
We’ve taken our compression test files, a collection of images, documents and other files ranging from 1KB to 50MB amounting to 3,343 files for 3GB and a single, large 12GB file. We’re posting the raw transfer results for your reference. Test data is copied off a PCI-express SSD.
Conclusion
We’ll be taking a look at the performance of these drives with a NAS in a separate review of the Synology DS415+ but for now let’s focus on the raw numbers that still give us a good idea of what we can expect from these WD 8TB Drives. First off, the capacity alone allows expansion of existing NAS drives without adding in more drives. At 8TB, 16TB is now achievable with only 2 drives instead of 4 x 4TB drives. That alone brings with it reduced power consumption and less vibration with less drives but an increase in capacity and depending on your RAID configuration, you can have increased performance as well.
In terms of performance, the drive delivers excellent raw numbers for both read and write. At an average of 180MB/s its got excellent transfer rate especially for something that packs so much data in the same form factor which means there’s so much density in those platters inside. WD has made great efforts in keeping the WD Red within a certain power and heat envelope despite improving capacity and performance as well which shows the improvements we can expect from these new drives going forward.
All in all, its an easy choice for anyone looking to expand their existing NAS or are looking to maximize a 2-bay or 4-bay drive. The WD Red 8TB offers solid performance and capacity making it an easy choice for SMB/SME and SOHO applications looking for larger storage and optimized performance for their NAS systems.
Price / Where to Buy:
US – Approx. US$336 – WD Red 8TB
PH – Php15900
WD backs the WD Red 8TB with a 3-year warranty. We give it our B2G Recommended Award.