We want to thank our customers and partners for their feedback on our family of WD Red Network Storage Hard Drives (NAS). Your real-world insights shared through in-depth reviews, blogs, forums and from our trusted partners are contributing directly. to our work in an expansion of models and clarity of choice for clients.
Here’s a breakdown of our NAS use case products:
- Our WD Series Device Managed Magnetic Staging Recording Network (DMSMR) (2TB, 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB) will be the choice for most NAS owners whose demands are on lighter SOHO workloads.
- WD Red Plus is the new name for conventional magnetic recording (CMR) based NAS drives in the WD Red family, which includes all the capabilities from 1TB to 14TB. This will be the option for those whose applications require more write-intensive SMB workloads, such as ZFS. WD Red Plus in 2TB, 3TB, 4TB and 6TB capacities will be available soon.
- Our WD Red Pro series (CMR 2TB to 14TB) for higher intensity use remains the same.
In our experience, we see that most SOHO users trust their systems to share office files, home backups, or content files. Performance and downtime are key considerations in these types of SOHO workloads. As explained in our post on DMSMR, as well as in media reviews, these drives prefer downtime to perform background operations, without which the drive may take longer to complete a command. Our use case analysis shows that SOHO workloads are generally based on short periods of drive access. This results in extremely low average throughput (compared to available disk performance) and provides plenty of downtime for the DMSMR disk to perform the necessary background operations, making it ideal for this application.
From a sequential performance perspective, our tests confirm that our WD Red DMSMR units are on par with our existing CMR units. Third-party testing also validates the performance of WD Red DMSMR drives compared to other drives under the general hard drive benchmarks used in a NAS environment.
In a RAID rebuild scenario using a typical Synology or QNAP (not ZFS) platform, WD Red DMSMR drives work just as well as CMR drives or show slightly longer RAID rebuild times, depending on the condition of the drive and the extent of reconstruction required. While test results may vary from one methodology and test bench to the next, we recognize that in some cases DMSMR, for the reasons of downtime covered above, may result in slower rebuild times.
For users with heavy workload applications and ZFS: CMR
The data explosion seen today has spawned a spectrum of NAS use cases as well as increasingly demanding applications. One of them includes the use of ZFS, an enterprise level file system. Increased amount of random writes sustained during ZFS recovery (similar to a rebuild) causes a lack of downtime for DMSMR drives to run internal data management tasks, resulting in significantly lower performance reported by users . While we work with iXsystems on DMSMR solutions for lesser workload ZFS clients, we currently recommend our CMR-based WD Red drives including WD Red Pro and the upcoming WD Red Plus.
We are listening
In addition to taking customer and partner feedback seriously, we internally tested the WD Red family of drives for compatibility, performance, endurance, and other factors. These units have generally been validated for compatibility on many NAS vendor platforms such as Synology, QNAP, Asustor, Buffalo, Netgear, and Thecus. DMSMR units met all of our testing requirements, and we are actively working with system manufacturers like Synology to ensure that use cases are validated for customers.
As a leader in HDD and flash technologies, we are committed to addressing the changing needs of our customers and offering the right technology for every deployment. This philosophy launched WD Red discs years ago, and they have been leaders in their field ever since. We continue to engage customers and partners and analyze real-world data to deliver a family of WD Red NAS drives, from HDD to SSD, serving all workloads and applications.
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