Western Digital

Test Rig

TYAN S5510GM3NR Server Motherboard
Intel Xeon E31220
16GB Kingston KVR1333D3E9S/4GEC
Crucial 128GB SSD Solid State Hard Drive
Windows Sever 2008 R2

For our testing we performed each of our benchmarks with both the drive in standalone mode and in RAID 5. While the Red Drives are aimed at the NAS market, a file server is still a perfectly legitimate use for them.

ATTO Disk Benchmark


	RAID 5	Single Drive

In the single drive test we can see that the drive gets around 151 MB/s write speed and 157 MB/s read. This is actually faster than the max specs for the drive. It’s nice to see WD doesn’t post best case specifications. When the 4 Red Drives are in RAID 5, we see that write speeds are faster than a single drive, but still far below the read speed. This is to be expected, and is an inherit issue with RAID 5. The read speeds on the other hand are significantly higher, averaging around 300 MB/s

CrystalDiskMark


	RAID 5	Single Drive

The RAID 5 read speeds are quite impressive at 429.9 MB/s. The write speeds are also quite respectable. Both read and write speeds are above 150 MB/s for the single drive, which is very good. With the IntelliPower variable RPM on the Red Drive, you wouldn’t expect it to perform at the same level as some 7200 RPM drives, but you would be wrong.

HDTune


	RAID 5 – Write	Single Drive – Write

	RAID 5 – Read	Single Drive – Read

HDTune tests the entire length of a drive instead of just a small area. Because of how traditional platter hard drives work, their speed can vary depending on where on the platter you are. HDTun shows a nice graph of the speed of the drives. We can see that the results of this benchmark are right in line with what we’ve been seeing in the others.

Windows File Transfer


	Write	Read

For our file transfer test we have the drives in a RAID 5 and configure a shared folder where we copy a large movie file to and from the share. We can see that the transfer rate is easily saturating the single gigabit connection to the file server. Unless you are using teamed NICs for your file server, you won’t be getting all the performance that these drives can deliver.