Western Digital WD40EFZX WD Red Plus 4TB SATA 6Gb/s 3.5" HDD

Product Information

NAS hard drives aren’t necessarily required to be the highest performing drives on the market. For most buyers, the primary considerations are reliability and warranty as well as the capacity points offered. This market also places more importance on how the drive is going to operate over its lifespan. That’s not to say performance isn’t a possible deliberation, and the WD Red features a quoted transfer rate around 150MB/s. Write tests tell a mostly similar story. As an individual drive, the WD40EFAX is performing pretty well in these benchmarks. PCMark8 Benchmark First up is the file copy test. Just a reminder, this test was performed as immediately as possible after completing the drive preparation process. File Copy Test Power supplies: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/proper-power-supply-sizing-guidance.39/

Don't use RAID: https://www.truenas.com/community/r...bas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.139/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 our first test measuring 4K random performance, the 3.5″ WD Red 4TB and 2.5″ WD Red 1TB both offered a step up in performance compared to the original 3TB WD Red, although still came up slightly behind the Seagate 4TB NAS HDD. The new 1TB WD Red offered storage read performance, although weaker write performance in the group. As an industry-leading hard drive manufacturer, Western Digital stands behind their NAS storage solutions with the assurance of a 3-year limited warranty and world-class support services for hassle free data storage. The File Server profile puts the drives through a varying workload with a thread and queue count that scales from 2T/2Q up to 16T/16Q. The WD Red again exhibits strong performance with two threads and a deep queue, but otherwise remains in the median position. ZIL and SLOG: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/some-insights-into-slog-zil-with-zfs-on-freenas.13633/

Since your NAS system is always on, a reliable drive is essential. WD Red Plus hard drives are designed for systems that operate 24x7, giving users the confidence of knowing they can reliably access their data. Western Digital partners with a wide range of NAS system vendors for extensive testing to ensure compatibility with most NAS enclosures. I am in the looking to replace my WD Red 3TB drives with WD Red Plus 6TB drives (making sure CMR tech is used). Now i noticed that a new WD Red Plus line has entered the market in 2021, namely the EFZX series with 128mb cache instead of 64mb cache currently used by the EFRX series. RAID Ready: WD Red hard drives are engineered with RAID error recovery control to help reduce failures within multi-bay NAS systems, unlike

Product Reviews

Virtualization: https://www.truenas.com/community/t...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/ Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes two 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, which is commonly used for enterprise drives.

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.

From the Manufacturer

All enterprise HDDs are benchmarked on our enterprise testing platform based on a Lenovo ThinkServer RD240. The ThinkServer RD240 is configured with: The Web Server test is comprised of 100% read activities across our range of threads and queue depths. As with most of the other benchmarks, the Red 4TB performs better than the Seagate NAS 4TB and WD Red 3TB but not as well as the Constellation CS 3TB or Se 4TB. Compatibility: Unlike desktop drives, WD Red Plus hard drives are specifically designed and tested for NAS and include NASware™ technology which fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads for optimum performance. 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. The Red 4TB beats out the other NAS-tuned drives in the web server average latency benchmark as well.

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 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. Designed for both consumers and small businesses, the WD Red is a high reliability, low-power consumption device that provides 24×7 operation and now ships in a 4TB capacity that updates the line. Those features are extremely important to users in the market. WD’s NASware 2.0 firmware optimizes the drive to operate in NAS environments by reducing noise and power consumption, providing tools to resolve issues, and limiting vibration. As we were able to show in this review, many of these updates paid off in our NAS environment. 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.

Overview

Customers MUST be informed of this new tech, even those using EXTERNAL SINGLE DRIVES ENCLOSURES!!! I have many WD external drives, and i DON’T WANT any drive with SMR!!! Period! 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. TrueNAS Scale for beginners: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/welcome-to-truenas-scale-beginners-intro.208/ We are going to start with some general benchmarks to try and place the WD Red (WD40EFAX) performance in a larger context. HDTune Read Benchmark