Western Digital's 4 TB WD4001FAEX Review: Back In Black

[jonjonjon]

hard drives are so boring. wake me up when something has changed. no that there is only wd, seagate and toshiba they have their little monopoly and are probably doing some shady price fixing. just look at the prices from the "flood". not to mention the quality has gone downhill.

 

[g-unit1111]

Coincidentally I'm listening to AC/DC's album "Back In Black" as I'm reading this.

 

[g-unit1111]

hard drives are so boring. wake me up when something has changed. no that there is only wd, seagate and toshiba they have their little monopoly and are probably doing some shady price fixing. just look at the prices from the "flood". not to mention the quality has gone downhill.

HD prices have actually decreased since the flood. A lot of that was actually due more to manufacturer consolidation than the flood itself - it just happened to be coinidentally timed as the latter was happening. Those two factors are what really caused the HD prices to skyrocket. If you look at the prices at all you can score a WD Caviar Blue for $80 where before the same drive was nearly $120. But mechanical HDs aren't going away any time soon for one reason: we have too much crap.

 

[Onus]

I would not use non-TLER drives in a RAID5 or RAID0, but I have never had a problem with any of them in RAID1.
And yes, RAID1 can fail in ways other than just a drive retiring early, so backups are still required.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]One thing i have never found a answer to : Is it worth defragmenting HDD's on modern systems, with Win7 and NTFS ?I do defragment my HDD, but subjectively i find no difference. And i have yet to find objective data.[/citation]

If it's a storage drive, only important to keep fragmentation down from being extreme so that the drive can handle multitasking without bogging down with tons of reads/writes due to the clutter. Also keeping fragmentation at bay helps with data recovery if the drive goes under. But no need to keep fragmentation way down, not that important.
If it's an OS drive then I recommend Ultimate Defrag or some such optimizer that can arrange files and folder alphabetically and more. This can increase performance by 10%, maybe a bit more than just defragging alone. But really, get an SSD!

 

[danwat1234]

I'm really surprised this drive did so poorly! What happened to it's magical peizo-electric wrist? It should have helped access times more than it did. Even a 5400RPM drive did better than any of the 7200RPM drives at access time.
I wish you would have put up numbers from the 2TB Caviar Black review, I bet it would have done very well amongst these drives.

 

[mapesdhs]

A quick example btw: I know a movie company which uses a lot of drives (by that I mean thousands,
they have a SAN that can sustain 10GB/sec). Some years ago they were sent a batch of consumer-
type Seagate Barracuda drives (the models that end with AS) instead of the Enterprise drives they'd
requested (the models that end in NS). Almost all of the AS drives had died in less than a week;
consumer drives just aren't designed to tolerate the 24/7 demands of Enterprise environments.

I'm building an After Effects system for someone atm (3930K C2, 64GB RAM, Quadro 4000, etc.)
I wanted to include professional storage, but buying new is normally expensive. I struck lucky though:
Aria UK was offering unused Hitachi Enterprise 1TB SATA system pulls for 46 UKP each, and I found
a local seller who had some Seagate Enterprise 2TB SATA drives for ~75 each. I bought an 8-port
HP P400 SAS/SATA RAID PCIe card (512MB cache and BBU) for about 65, so the system has 4 of
the Hitachis as the main storage in RAID0 (insufficient budget to buy enough drives for RAID10), the
Seagate 2TB for initial backup, while the system drive and AE cache are both new 256GB Samsung 830s.

In other words, a mix of 'reliable' new consumer grade items and 'used' professional items helps reduce
costs for a professional on a less than ideal budget.

Choosing to buy a new large capacity consumer drive for a professional environment really is a bad
idea, it's asking for trouble. I'd rather have used professional SAS which is far more reliable, eg. I buy
Seagate 600GB 15K SAS (15K.7 series) as and when I can, which I might add are waaaaay faster
than any of the consumer drives mentioned in this review (over 200MB/sec max, 127MB/sec min,
175MB/sec avg). I've bought a fair few used Enterprise SATA aswell which have been good buys,
mostly Seagate 750GB ST3750640NS and ST3750330NS (cheap, as hobbyists tend to ignore them).
Just put these on a low-cost SAS card such as an LSI 3082E-R, P400, etc., one then has speed,
reliability and backup all for a decent price.

I have lots of FC drives but don't use them much, the capacities are a bit low (dozens of 73GB 10K,
22 of them in a single SUN unit alone), will probably sell them as they're original Discreet disks.

Ian.

PS. Point to note: the access time of the 15K SAS leaves consumer drives in the dust. I have one as a
system disk in a Dell T7500. My site has detailed benchmark info.

 

[g-unit1111]

O RLY?

http://techreport.com/review/23867/hard-drive-prices-one-year-after-the-flood

Yeah but let's not forget that four major manufacturers have merged into two - Hitachi sold to Western Digital, and Samsung sold to Seagate - that had a huge impact on hard drive prices as much as the flood did. It's pretty close to being a monopoly in the industry.

 

[Tanquen]

The price is just too high. I would rather have an internal but I got a 4TB My Book Essential USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive for $179 total delivered from B&H three weeks ago.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]mapesdhs[/nom]A quick example btw: I know a movie company which uses a lot of drives (by that I mean thousands,they have a SAN that can sustain 10GB/sec). Some years ago they were sent a batch of consumer-type Seagate Barracuda drives (the models that end with AS) instead of the Enterprise drives they'drequested (the models that end in NS). Almost all of the AS drives had died in less than a week;consumer drives just aren't designed to tolerate the 24/7 demands of Enterprise environments.[/citation]
Well, I use a consumer drive in my laptop (scorpio black 750GB) and that hard drive is on nearly 24/7, many times on for many days at a time with no spin down delay, it is always fully ready (spinning). Been running for 1.42 years now of power on time, zero problems, SMART report is fine.

I doubt most of their consumer drives died within a week unless it was a really really bad batch.

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]danwat1234[/nom]Well, I use a consumer drive in my laptop (scorpio black 750GB) and that hard drive is on nearly 24/7, many times on for many days at a time with no spin down delay, it is always fully ready (spinning). Been running for 1.42 years now of power on time, zero problems, SMART report is fine.I doubt most of their consumer drives died within a week unless it was a really really bad batch.[/citation]

You miss the point completely. The fact that your drive is on all the time means you're less likely to experience problems until much later in it's MTBF rating, which works in your favour based on your useage description. Powering drives on and off continually does them no good at all, but in a consumer application that is quickly to happen a lot. In an enterprise scenario drives are not spun up/down with regularity and you can go ask any storage expert how he feels when his server room is going to loose power over a weekend due to required eletrical work - when your arrays have been powered up for the last two years you know that out of the all the disks you have that some of them will not make it past their next power cycle. So please, you're not comparing apples with apples and a consumer drive in your laptop is exactly what you should have.

Whats more, judging from your comments about 10% increases in performance due to defragging and alphatetical re-order of on-disk data just made me laugh my rear off ... I'd leave it there if I were you.

 

[mapesdhs]

danwat1234 writes:
> Well, I use a consumer drive in my laptop (scorpio black 750GB) and that hard drive is on nearly 24/7, ...



Having a consumer product like a laptop turned on 24/7 is not remotely the same as a drive being hammered
with intensive I/O quite literally all the time. A typical scene render at a movie studio these days can require
the processing of as much as 500GB of data; the studio I'm referring to mostly uses 4K and 8K, so the
amount of data flying around is seriously enormous, orders of magnitude beyond what any consumer drive
will ever experience. Saying one has a laptop drive that's not gone wrong in 18 months is saying nothing at
all. I have a long-lived laptop drive aswell (300GB IDE) but I'd never even consider drawing some kind of
comparison conclusion from that to the realm of professional workloads.


> ... I doubt most of their consumer drives died within a week unless it was a really really bad batch.

Nope, not at all, it's simpy that consumer Barracudas can't handle the workload of such environments.
Don't take my word for it, ask Seagate; they had a report a few years ago explaining why using consumer
drives in Enterprise environments is such a bad idea. Consumer products are not designed for 24/7 use,
and note by 24/7 one does not mean the disk is merely powered on all the time; it means the disk is likely
being hammered constantly with intense I/O all day, all night. Have to say I'm a bit surprised you didn't
know this. Summary:

Consumer: tens of MB/sec typical at most.
Professional/industrial: potentially 100s of MB/sec to low multi-GB/sec.
Defense (defense imaging)/corporate-professional (8K film)/high-industrial (oil/gas): low to high multi-GB/sec.

If you want an example of the kind of systems I'm referring to, see:

http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/uv/models.html#uv2000


My SGI site has some technical product briefs that describe some of these Enterprise environments (wrt previous
generations of their hardware), the nature of the work involved, data demands, etc. Even ten years ago defense
imaging was using systems capable of 40GB/sec to handle 2D image files of 10K to 100K resolution, while GIS
datasets were 100GB+. NASA is planning on having camera monitoring of spacecraft launches that can generate
500TB per launch. This kind of extraordinary I/O requirement needs hw far beyond the simple devices consumers
use. Most likely NASA is using FC or SAS for such tasks, because of the file system scalability they'd need.

Heh, a laptop drive that hasn't died yet; as Sheldon would say, big whoop.

Ian.

 

[TeraMedia]

@Tanquen: The 4 TB drive in the WD My Book Essentials is probably a blue, green, or red drive. I'm curious what the warranty is, because I suspect it is far shorter than 5 years. And that's the primary reason to get WD Caviar Blacks instead of Blues.

Question I have for all of you is this: Would any of you reading the article buy this HDD at list price? And if not, then at what price? And how would you use it? I'm not interested in reading your conjectures about how someone else might use it, but rather how you yourself would use this drive in a real-world system. For my part, I've suffered enough failed drives and benefitted from enough RAID 5 rebuilds to never want to risk that much data without at least RAID 1.

EDIT:
And FWIW, HDD prices are *almost* back down where they were just before the flood. Back then, I bought a 3 TB external Hitachi for $109, and prices on 3 TB internals were just over that. I am just beginning to see 3 TB drives approaching that price level, ~$0.03633 / GB, now.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]pchisholm[/nom]......... judging from your comments about 10% increases in performance due to defragging and alphatetical re-order of on-disk data just made me laugh my rear off ... I'd leave it there if I were you.[/citation]
I said ; "If it's an OS drive then I recommend Ultimate Defrag or some such optimizer that can arrange files and folder alphabetically and more. This can increase performance by 10%, maybe a bit more than just defragging alone. But really, get an SSD!"

That is my experience from years of doing this. In typical desktop consumer usage patterns on an OS drive, optimizing a drive alphabetically versus just doing a complete defrag, you get about 10% more performance. Nothing to write home about but it does help. Sometimes a bit more but not always.

@Both you and Teramedia, so my Scorpio Black hasn't had a hard life, this is true. But consider this. For kicks many years ago I set up a 486 computer with a WD Caviar sub 1GB IDE hard drive with 24MB of RAM with seti@home on windows 95. That thing was swapping like crazy and I kept it on for months without a problem. Seti@home takes ~16MB by itself.
Another example, A very badly fragmented I think Toshiba or Hitachi brand of 1GB IDE laptop drive, it took days to defrag completely, drive thrashing at 100%, no problems.
A consumer drive shouldn't quit just because it has a hard workload for a week straight, unless it's a bad drive. Unless temperature is extreme. Just like a consumer CPU, you can keep it at 100% utilization essentially indefinitely if temperatures are good. Of course drives wear because they are mechanical but same principal.

 

[mapesdhs]

Sorry but what you're describing are NOT hard workloads at all, just the normal consumer guff that Windows imposes
on home PC drives. Not remotely the same thing as an Enterprise workload. The fact that you had some old IDE doing
a light ask with some swapping means squat in the world of professional apps and Enterprise workloads. Didn't you
read my comments above about the huge amounts of data some tasks involve?

I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make...

Ian.

 

[twelch82]

Out of a hard drive, I'm not really looking for the fastest performance available. I have SSDs for that. I want reliability out of a drive that's going to be in a PC that's probably left on 24x7.

That's not to say I want it to be slow, because there's a good chance I'll put some of my games etc. on it, but all of my WD drives have been very reliable - I've only actually had one failure out of any of the drives I've ever owned, and that was a raptor that failed after more than 7 years. The other drives were simply cycled out of use before they had a chance to fail. That's really the key factor for me, and the reason why I would buy WD over Seagate even though the Seagate drive may be faster.

 

[mapesdhs]

twelch82, that's a nice way of putting it from a normal consumer's point of view. For a drive as large as 4TB,
I would only use one if it was setup with at least RAID1. The consequences of losing data are just too significant,
unless one has some other kind of backup strategu such as Ultrium tape or something.

Ian.

 

[Tanquen]

@Tanquen: The 4 TB drive in the WD My Book Essentials is probably a blue, green, or red drive. I'm curious what the warranty is, because I suspect it is far shorter than 5 years. And that's the primary reason to get WD Caviar Blacks instead of Blues....

I know, I think it may even be a Hitachi drive but the point is they will sell the drive in a fancy box with a USB 3 cable, power supply and an external case that has some kind of USB 3 to SATA controller for $179 but I have to pay double that for an internal drive. It’s just crazy.

I don’t think the true failure rate on the black is really going to be all that different, you’re just paying for the extra 2 years of coverage.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]mapesdhs[/nom]Sorry but what you're describing are NOT hard workloads at all, just the normal consumer guff that Windows imposeson home PC drives. Not remotely the same thing as an Enterprise workload. The fact that you had some old IDE doinga light ask with some swapping means squat in the world of professional apps and Enterprise workloads. Didn't youread my comments above about the huge amounts of data some tasks involve?I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make...Ian.[/citation]
Well that was a heavy task, near 100% utilization from random read write operations constantly.

The point I'm making is that the movie company you know of, they were doing something wrong when they were installing those consumer class drives. They should last way more than a week at full bore brutal workloads as long as temperatures are good. They simply don't wear out that fast, ones that are good batches from the factory at least.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]g-unit1111[/nom]HD prices have actually decreased since the flood. A lot of that was actually due more to manufacturer consolidation than the flood itself - it just happened to be coinidentally timed as the latter was happening. Those two factors are what really caused the HD prices to skyrocket. If you look at the prices at all you can score a WD Caviar Blue for $80 where before the same drive was nearly $120. But mechanical HDs aren't going away any time soon for one reason: we have too much crap.[/citation]

Prices are generally still much higher than before the flood *problem*. Right before the flood, a SATA 600MB/S 64MB cache Caviar Green 1TB could be had for around $60 and the 2TB model for around $80 in the USA. Today, I'd be lucky to find anything better than a 500GB model at that price except maybe through an occasional sale for a day or two.

I doubt that hard drives will go away within even the next few decades, but lets be reasonable about what the prices were and how they compare to today. Prices have improved since the peak right after the flood, but they're still not as low as they used to be except maybe for some 3TB models.

 

[rantoc]

My recommendation for a somewhat strained budget the typical quick but rather small SSD for boot + basic software and then a mammoth sized HDD for storage (typically bulky media files/backup ect). That basic config do the trick nicely in 95% of the cases.

No budget retrains - SSD's pref in raid all the way!

 

[redeye]

Tchotchkes... you received condoms as Tchotchkes?... LOL. and what loks like ritter sport chocolate...

 

[Guest]

Why 5 platters? Their Red 3 TB uses 3 platters. They could be making 5 TB drives. They are using obsolete technology.

Also, why not open the drive to see how many platters there are?

BTW I own two 3TB Barracudas that I ripped out of external drives, as they were 40$ cheaper than the same model internal drive. Barracudas are not really good for raid or semi-continuous use, (they take about 8 seconds to wake up, really bad for a raid), but for a basic consumer, boy are they fast!

 

[kenyee]

I'd buy a 4TB WD Red w/ 5yr warranty....

 

[thecolorblue]

Dear Tom's,

why waste a paragraph on how you aren't sure how many platters the drive has???????????

after you're done benchmarking, pull out a screwdriver and LOOK for yourself!!!
aren't you guys supposed to be tech literate?