Western Digital Red Hard Disks: Worth It?

Alex Wauck

Source

I recently purchased a few Western Digital Red hard disks, and I am utterly amazed at how quiet they are. No grunting noises when seeking, no buzzing from vibration, nothing but a quiet hum. The disks are no louder than the fan on the RAID enclosure I mounted them in. I've historically gone with Seagate instead of WD, and I've been fairly satisfied with those drives, but the Seagate drives in my home server make all kinds of grunty noises when in active use. In fact, that's the main reason my server lives in a closet: the fans are pretty darn quiet, but the disks make obnoxious noises at random intervals. If a Raspberry Pi proves sufficient to act as a media center PC, I think I'll just hook up the RAID enclosure to my current media center and make that the home server. If I can get away with not using the fan on that machine (not using its GPU anymore should keep it cooler), then it should be so quiet that I can put it somewhere more convenient than a closet. WIN!

Performance is good, too. See the bonnie++ output below (using btrfs on top of hardware RAID 5 via USB 3). Performance with XFS is similar.

Version  1.96       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
Concurrency   1     -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
jekyll       15864M   502  98 122763  19 35330  12  2763  84 171190  29 123.0   6
Latency             52353us     200ms     277ms   60373us     210ms   25013ms
Version  1.96       ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
jekyll              -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 17863  27 +++++ +++ 26661  66 27059  46 +++++ +++ 18532  61
Latency               305us    1224us    2712us     330us      47us    1420us

In short, I absolutely recommend WD Red hard disks for NAS-type devices, especially if quiet operation is important. Totally worth the extra money.

Update (2015-09-12): I'm still using those disks, and I still like them.