Just a quick congratulations to our own sotech on his piece today regarding WD Red series drives. I am very excited to see what he comes up with regarding additional performance figures in the coming days.
sotech on WD Red series drives
- Thread starter Patrick
- Start date
Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
Nice work sotech. FWIW a source has told me that WD already has a firmware update in the works for these, as to whether or not they'll ever divulge what changed and/or whether they'll be field upgradeable or just silently slipped into new production runs going forward remains to be seen. Knowing WD it will be whatever option is least respectful of consumers.
I got about 8 of these in for testing a few weeks ago but I'm not blown away so far, and anyway I've got a rule about not purchasing significant quantities of any new make/model drive that has been on the market less than 6 months - precisely for the early kinks that invariably pop up with a new line and then get quietly fixed in the middle of the night, often leaving early adopters hanging.
I got about 8 of these in for testing a few weeks ago but I'm not blown away so far, and anyway I've got a rule about not purchasing significant quantities of any new make/model drive that has been on the market less than 6 months - precisely for the early kinks that invariably pop up with a new line and then get quietly fixed in the middle of the night, often leaving early adopters hanging.
Last edited:
hey patrick! you know i'm always around. i tend to go through cycles where i get heavily involved in storage stuff and then burn out for 6 months once it becomes pointless enough or the threads on some of the other forums i frequent start to become skull-hammeringly repetitive. but no excuse for not checking in more often and have a few ideas to make up for lost time.
Essentially they didn't want to just let Seagate totally own this segment with the 1TB platter STx000DM001 models, which people are buying in droves, and as usual they went about it the lame WDC way at least from a consumer standpoint. That doesn't mean its a bad drive and TBH if people are just storing their media files in a smallish NAS then a lot of the metrics it falls short in relative to the competition will be invisible anyway. And its certainly better than buying a Blue or Green if we're talking WDC.
I may form all the data I've compiled into some type of review format but not sure, it started out as a quest for a spiritual successor to the Hitachi's just for my own knowledge. Not that they need a successor because I plan on continuing to run mine for years. I would however advise anyone not to buy significant quantities of any particular make/model just yet for purposes of standardization for raid/zfs/whatever until Toshiba shows its cards in Q3/Q4. I really have high hopes for Toshiba and rooting for them after the consumer-averse maneuvers that WDC and Seagate pulled in killing half the market's worth of competition through buyouts rather than on the strengths and merits of their products - all made possible by the warchests generated with mediocrity marketed correctly to the consumer & SOHO segments, much like drobo, apple, don't get me started.
Bottom line, all the data is telling me that Seagate and WDC are very likely both gaming their offerings to fit an agenda rather than bang-for-buck, at least more so than the now deceased competition were doing it. The data is also telling me they seem to each do it in their own way: WDC clocks down their hardware while Seagate clocks down their spec sheets (understating). And then there's the whole conspiracy theory that's sprung up whereby some people feel Seagate intentionally baked excessive load/unload cycling behavior into the firmware on the 1TB/platter models so they die faster. That's also something I've been doing my own testing on since the hysteria usually gets it wrong.
However to make any claims at least in a published format would need more backing data and time, which I'm not sure will be worth my time but I'll continue to evaluate. It would end up looking like more of a storage industry version of a 60 minutes expose' on the practices of these companies and that's always a difficult tightrope for any site trying to develop or maintain relationships with these companies and not have them irate and threatening to cut off sampling now or in the future. But it sho am would be fun.
I've been doing exhaustive head to head testing between the Red and a few other drives in its segment that goes somewhat beyond what the review sites have done with the Reds but to bottom line it, its felt like it was being held back, maybe bottlenecking at the processor and in all likelihood done by WDC intentionally so, in the belief that it would mitigate the cannibalization of enterprise offerings. Then I got some insider info basically confirming it with details of exactly what was done to make them square peg for the round enterprise hole so nobody dares use them for random io heavy stuff instead of RE's. Nothing necessarily profound that anyone else hasn't been able to read between the lines and I could go on but some of the info may be confidential and I will see if the source is comfortable with it being shared then expand. Or may just invite him on here because he knows his stuff.
Essentially they didn't want to just let Seagate totally own this segment with the 1TB platter STx000DM001 models, which people are buying in droves, and as usual they went about it the lame WDC way at least from a consumer standpoint. That doesn't mean its a bad drive and TBH if people are just storing their media files in a smallish NAS then a lot of the metrics it falls short in relative to the competition will be invisible anyway. And its certainly better than buying a Blue or Green if we're talking WDC.
I may form all the data I've compiled into some type of review format but not sure, it started out as a quest for a spiritual successor to the Hitachi's just for my own knowledge. Not that they need a successor because I plan on continuing to run mine for years. I would however advise anyone not to buy significant quantities of any particular make/model just yet for purposes of standardization for raid/zfs/whatever until Toshiba shows its cards in Q3/Q4. I really have high hopes for Toshiba and rooting for them after the consumer-averse maneuvers that WDC and Seagate pulled in killing half the market's worth of competition through buyouts rather than on the strengths and merits of their products - all made possible by the warchests generated with mediocrity marketed correctly to the consumer & SOHO segments, much like drobo, apple, don't get me started.
Bottom line, all the data is telling me that Seagate and WDC are very likely both gaming their offerings to fit an agenda rather than bang-for-buck, at least more so than the now deceased competition were doing it. The data is also telling me they seem to each do it in their own way: WDC clocks down their hardware while Seagate clocks down their spec sheets (understating). And then there's the whole conspiracy theory that's sprung up whereby some people feel Seagate intentionally baked excessive load/unload cycling behavior into the firmware on the 1TB/platter models so they die faster. That's also something I've been doing my own testing on since the hysteria usually gets it wrong.
However to make any claims at least in a published format would need more backing data and time, which I'm not sure will be worth my time but I'll continue to evaluate. It would end up looking like more of a storage industry version of a 60 minutes expose' on the practices of these companies and that's always a difficult tightrope for any site trying to develop or maintain relationships with these companies and not have them irate and threatening to cut off sampling now or in the future. But it sho am would be fun.
Last edited:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. If you don't want to take the time for a complete review, you could always just post some benchmarks or whatever data you have. No need to make any claims, just let the data speak for itself.