The workload rate is the amount of data a user can transfer to or from the hard drive in the space of a year. The Seagate IronWolf and the WD Red drive have a workload of 180 TB/yr. This might vary slightly depending on your software and hardware. Interface WD Red Pro hard drives are designed to handle the rigorous demands of high-intensity 24x7 multi-user NAS environments and increase system durability.

Despite using less power, the drives have plenty of bandwidth to handle the mixed performance demands of multi-drive NAS systems.

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It is important to distinguish these drives from standard desktop drives; while desktop drives might initially function similarly, their reliability would likely deteriorate in the always-on NAS environment. Since desktop drives tend to operate isolated from other drives, they aren’t typically built to withstand the constant vibrations inherent to a multi-drive system. Using a NAS-optimized drive like the WD Red will give users a more consistent and reliable performance. WD Reds were also designed to thrive in SMB and RAID environments while consuming minimal energy, subsequently producing less heat. Loading an 8-bay NAS with standard desktop drives would cause significant overheating, potentially damaging the drives as well as the NAS itself.

The results of our max latency benchmark (CIFS) were scattered, but the WD Red drives posted lower latencies than the other drives for the most part. The Seagate NAS drives fell behind in this benchmark, especially towards the end. MTBF: It is short for Mean Time Between Failure and refers to the average working time between two adjacent failures. MTBF can reflect the relative reliability of a series of products and disk array products generally have an MTBF of no less than 50,000 hours. The one area that the Seagate IronWolf did excel was with the drive health monitoring. It was very handy being able to keep an eye on how the hard drive is working. Although the WD Red drives performed well with write functions in the iSCSI configuration of our 8k sequential benchmark (18,227 IOPS), it fells short with read functions (16,340 IOPS). The Seagate Enterprise NAS drives posted the highest read performance (30,677 IOPS).Load/Unload Cycles: It refers to the number of times the head moves in/out of the hard disk when powered on. This factor has nothing to do with the hard drive failure, but it will affect hard drive lifespan. WD Red Pro 22TB hard drives feature Western Digital’s proprietary OptiNAND™ technology which leverages integrated iNAND embedded flash to perform key housekeeping functions, freeing up more capacity and improving the overall drive performance. Reliability: Desktop drives aren’t typically designed for the demands of an always-on NAS environment. WD Red Plus hard drives are designed to perform under tough conditions encountered in high-intensity 24x7 multi-user NAS environments.

Western Digital partners with a wide range of NAS system vendors for extensive testing to ensure compatibility with most NAS enclosures. After looking at the specifics and the pros and cons, we felt that the WD Red was the better internal hard drive. The difference in cost was very little and overall, the WD Red was more reliable. The NASware 3.0 technology made it much more convenient to connect with other devices. Once again, WD has delivered a great product that is durable and efficient while still being great value for money. The form factor is the size of the space that you will need inside your PC to install the hard drives. These internal hard drives have a 3.5-inch form factor. However, if you don’t have an empty 3.5-inch bay in your PC, adaptors are available. Compatibility Compared to the fixed 16 thread, 16 queue max workload we performed in the 100% 4k write test, our mixed workload profiles scale the performance across a wide range of thread/queue combinations. In these tests, we span workload intensity from 2 threads and 2 queue up to 16 threads and 16 queue. All of the drives that we tested in CIFS performed similarly, although the Seagate NAS drives posted higher numbers for the most part, and the WD Red drives performed on the lower end of the spectrum.Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes four profiles based on real-world tasks. These profiles have been developed to make it easier to compare to our past benchmarks as well as widely-published values such as max 4k read and write speed and 8k 70/30. Hard drives that are not properly balanced may cause excessive vibration and noise in multi-drive systems, which could reduce hard drive life span and degrade the performance over time. Our enhanced dual-plane balance control technology significantly improves balance and increases overall drive performance and reliability. Once again, the results were similar when the drives were configured in iSCSI; although the numbers were close, the WD Red drives (98.35ms read and 173.3ms write) were outperformed by the Seagate NAS drives (80.2ms read and 155.5ms write). In the iSCSI configuration, the WD Red drives were in line with the Seagate Enterprise NAS drives in terms of write function (130ms) but fell short compared to the Seagate NAS drives (121ms). The WD Red drives were outperformed in terms of read function (105ms) compared to the other drives tested. Note: Some disk companies have recently begun to use AFR (Annualized Failure Rate) instead of MTBF, because AFR can indicate the reliability of a single product.