WD NasWare Red WD100EFAX 10 TB

WD100EFAX

(WD100EFAX)

Hitachi Ultrastar He10 in a new guise

After the takeover of the Hitachi Global Storage Technologies division by Western Digital, it naturally took up the developments of its new division. So the hero of this review, the 10-terabyte WD Red is actually the twin brother of the popular Hitachi Ultrastar He10 helium server hard drive. The only difference is that the WD model is designed for the consumer rather than the corporate segment and therefore went through a series of simplifications. The spindle speed has been reduced from 7200 to 5400 rpm, the MTBF has been reduced, the warranty has become three years, and the vibration sensors have also been simplified. Although, the balancing mechanism that protects the disk from excessive vibrations remained. All this was done to shift the focus from downtrodden to the least wanted server racks to compact multi-bay NAS servers.

Server HDD at minimum

In general, the guys from WD seemed to be trying to sit on two chairs by releasing a hard drive that is much cooler than a regular HDD in an average home computer, but at the same time not as cool as those that chug in server rooms. WD Red differs from desktop HDDs in the ability to work in non-stop mode, since even in passive mode, the spindle never stops and the heads park. Surprisingly, even with reduced speeds, the drive shows excellent speeds: 211 MB / s for sequential reading and 210 MB / s for sequential writing. Also, the reduced spindle speeds had a beneficial effect on the temperature regime and noise level.

NASware proprietary firmware

The main problem with WD Red is the high price. If its twin brother Hitachi Ultrastar He10 was initially expensive, and then dropped to the level of Seagate IronWolf, then WD Red has recently jumped up. In some stores, the difference in price exceeds 20%, which, in our opinion, is unreasonably high. Let's not forget that He10 is a hard drive with a five-year warranty, completely different features and a level of fault tolerance. At the same time, WD Red has a significant trump card up its sleeve, which is important specifically for NAS systems, not server ones. And this is NASware proprietary firmware, which would be more correctly called a separate OS. It provides the maximum data density per platter, ensures that drives do not fall out of the RAID array, and supports the Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) feature, which quickly recovers data in bad sectors without freezes.