Miscellaneous Factors & Final Words

Power consumption measurement was done by running our standard IOMeter disk performance bench on a CIFS share in the LenovoEMC PX2-300D (single disk in a JBOD configuration). The following table summarizes the power consumption of the NAS unit at the wall under various operating modes.

4 TB NAS Hard Drive Face-Off: LenovoEMC PX2-300D Power Consumption Mode WD Red Seagate NAS HDD WD Se WD Re Idle 18.25 W 19.29 W 22.67 W 23.68 W Max. Throughput (100% Reads) 19.51 W 20.56 W 23.54 W 24.53 W Real Life (60% Random, 65% Reads) 19.58 W 20.60 W 23.95 W 24.49 W Max. Throughput (50% Reads) 19.67 W 20.63 W 24.11 W 24.41 W Random 8 KB (70% Reads) 19.07 W 20.98 W 23.54 W 23.68 W

The above numbers suggest that the WD Red is the most power-efficient of all the considered models. This was definitely on the cards once it was determined that the WD Red operates at 5400 rpm while the Seagate NAS HDD operates at 5900 rpm. Disks running at 7200 rpm have a significant power penalty.

Concluding Remarks

Coming to the business end of the review, one must note that both Western Digital and Seagate have put forward convincing offerings for the 1-5 bay NAS market. While the Seagate unit manages to win most of the performance tests, it comes at the cost of an increase in power consumption. 1-5 bay NAS system users looking for top performance at lower price points might do well to take a look at the Seagate NAS HDD. On the other hand, if a cool-running system is the need of the hour and performance is not a major concern, the WD Red makes an excellent choice. We have also been very impressed with WD's response to various user complaints about the first generation Red drives. Seagate's track record with the NAS HDD is pretty small since the drives started shipping just a couple of months ago. As the drives get more widespread, compatibility issues (if any) get resolved and more user field reports become public.

Sometimes, the expected workloads become too heavy (> 150 TB/yr) for the consumer NAS drives to handle. Under those circumstances, the WD Se and WD Re are excellent choices. The WD Se can handle up to 180 TB/yr and the WD Re can go up to 550 TB/yr. Thanks to their higher rotational speed (7200 rpm), the enterprise grade drives have much better performance on the whole. We have also been using the WD Re drives for evaluation of various NAS systems. The disks have gone through countless rebuilds for test purposes and are still going strong. We have no qualms in standing behind the WD Re drives for very heavy NAS workloads.