WD Red vs WD Se

[sgibbers17]

I'm in the market for a new drive and was wondering is the extra $65 for the 3TB Se over the 3TB Red is worth the price?  The main difference is the extra 2 Year warranty.

[garycase]

Definitely NOT.  Go with the Red.

 

The SE is an excellent drive -- but it's a 5-platter, 600GB/platter drive.  So even at 7200rpm it will have a slower sustained transfer rate than the 1TB/platter Reds.    It WILL have faster access time, but for typical UnRAID use the faster transfer speeds will easily trump that parameter.

 

[sgibbers17]

Wow fast reply, thanks for the input.

[garycase]

You're welcome.

 

Note that the SE is indeed an excellent drive -- it does indeed have a better warranty, and will work fine with 24/7 operation (just like the Reds) => if it was a 1TB/platter drive I'd have a few of them myself.  But the NAS qualified drives (WD Reds and Seagate NAS units) are superb drives and both the WD and the Seagate units are 1TB/platter units.

 

[Fireball3]

Hey Gary,

I've read many times how you're stressing this "sustained transfer rate".

Do you really think this is a limiting factor for unRAID?

 

When it comes to transfer rate the bottleneck when reading is the GB-LAN.

I dare to argue that all modern drives are well above 100 MB/s in "sustained transfer rate".

 

As I understand, in writing, the parity drive is limiting because of the 2 read/write cycles.

The parity drive should therefore be one with a very good I/O performance where a RED is definitely not good.

 

Unfortunately I can only provide a test in german language but the charts are in english.

 

So it would be reasonable to take the drive with the best I/O performance for parity and the ones with the best price/gb (warranty, whatsoever) as storage drives.

 

Edit:

Found another comparison of WD Re, Se and Red drives.

[garycase]

As I noted above, the SE is indeed an excellent drive, and easily outperforms the Reds in access times.    If UnRAID was being used as a transactional server, with constant multiple accesses from multiple clients, then this difference would indeed be significant.

 

But as I said above, for typical UnRAID use the faster transfer speeds will easily trump the faster access times for overall performance.    You'll get faster writes if the parity drive is an SE (or any 7200rpm drive),  but it would also result in significantly longer parity check times (this may or not be a factor you care about).

 

Note that the 4TB version of the SE uses 800 GB platters, so it will mitigate some of those tradeoffs.    The only Enterprise-class drives using 1TB platters are the Seagate Constellation CS series, which use 1TB platters in both the 3TB and 4TB drives.  These would provide both the improved seek performance and even higher transfer rates than the NAS units (since they're spinning faster).    But note that they're only warranted for one year.

 

Bottom line:  I stand by my comment that the best drives for UnRAID are the NAS units.  But if you want a 7200 rpm drive for parity to improve write times, then a 7200rpm 4TB WD SE is a good choice.  It's higher rpm will offset the lower areal density, so its sustained transfer rate is 97% of the rate of a 5900rpm 1TB platter.  [Remember, however, that this is only true for the 4TB SE ... the 3TB SE uses 600GB platters]    But for the other drives, I'd stay with NAS units -- the cooler operation and lower power draw are much more appropriate for UnRAID.