When it comes to storing large amounts of data in a data center or even a single large-scale server rack array, having larger capacity hard drives is essential to achieve better Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). However, with many applications requiring access to frequently used warm data, traditionally more affordable but slower mechanical HDDs have begun to present a bottleneck – with many highlighting the glass-ceiling performance of traditional single actuator (the arm that reads the platters) drives starting to become the end of the road! Although WD is not the first to discuss and research into confronting this bottleneck (more on that later), the newly revealed Ultrastar DC HS760 is Western Digital’s solution to this issue, delivering high performance and high capacity for demanding data center applications, whilst maintaining the things that have made the Ultrastar series a continued popular choice in data centers worldwide. But what exactly is a dual actuator HDD? Why does that subject sound so familiar? And is this a new kind of HDD technology (alongside EAMR and MAMR) that you need to keep an eye on? Let’s discuss.

Key Hardware Highlights

What is Dual Actuator Technology and Why is it a Big Deal?

Dual actuator hard drives are a type of hard drive that utilizes two independent actuators to read and write data. An actuator is a device that moves the read/write heads of a hard drive in order to access data stored on the disk platters. In a dual-actuator hard drive, two independent actuators are used to move the read/write heads, allowing for faster access times and improved performance. For example, technically, a 16TB Dual Actuator equipped HDD is actually two 8TB HDDs that are inside the same HDD casing space, sealed by helium to ensure that thinner platters can be used, significantly reducing friction/drag potential.

The Prototype of the dual-actuator Western Digital Disk, which was first revealed at the March 2019 Open Compute Project Summit Event.

The two actuators are connected to separate motors, which can be independently controlled by the hard drive’s controller. This allows for more precise control over the movement of the read/write heads, resulting in faster access times and improved performance. The Ultrastar DC HS760 is a 20TB dual actuator CMR HDD that leverages Western Digital’s 2.2TB/disk density platters (as seen in their recent 20TB and 22TB releases in WD Red, WD Gold and Ultrastar). The two independent actuators that can simultaneously read or write data, providing up to twice the sequential performance. With each 10TB LUN appearing as an independent storage volume, the host application can manage file placement between the two volumes, improving access density (IOPS/TB). The benefits of a dual actuator include up to 2x sequential throughput, up to 1.7x random performance, and up to 37% more power efficiency. WD Are still yet to confirm the precise performance stats (and these percentage improvements come directly from their own product pages) but given the higher-end nature of their end-user base, the SAS interface on these drives (which might open up in future generations to SATA) and implementation of other elements of the Ultrastar DC drive series technology (eg OptiNAND), then I would not really doubt their commitment to these numbers. But, haven’t we heard about dual actuators in HDDs before?

How are the WD Dual Actuator Ultrastar DC HS760 and Seagate EXOS Mach.2 Drives Different?

We somewhat need to address the dual actuator-equipped elephant in the room! Back in 2019/2020, Seagate made quite a splash when they revealed their EXOS Mach.2 series of HDDs. These eventually rolled out commercially in 2021 in 14TB and 16TB versions, the Exos 2X14 consisted of two 7TB hard drives housed in a single hermetically sealed, helium-filled 3.5-inch chassis. It had a 7200 RPM platter speed, a 256MB multisegmented cache, and a single-port SAS 12Gb/s interface. The host system viewed the Exos 2X14 and 2X16 as two separate and independently addressable drives when connected. In full utility, it boasted 524MB/s sustained transfer rate. Originally designed to challenge the difficulty of choosing between cheap-large-slow HDDs or expensive-small-fast SSDs at the data center level. Fast forward to 2023 and we now have additional 16TB and 18TB Seagate EXOS Mach2 drives, in the 2X16 and 2X18 respectively. So what sets the Western Digital DC HS760 HDDs apart from these Seagate Mach.2 Drives?

Although both drives are designed for the enterprise market (so 55TB Workloads and 2.5M hours MTBF is quite standard and comparable with their single actuator counterparts), the WD drive also includes OptiNAND (Something we discussed HERE in our WD Red Pro 22TB Review last year). OptiNAND Technology The Ultrastar DC HS760 utilizes Western Digital’s proven OptiNAND technology, which integrates an iNAND Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Embedded Flash Drive (EFD) with traditional spinning disk media. This allows the drive to have better performance and data protection compared to traditional drives. Additionally, the WD Ultrastar DC HS760 also arrives with ArmorCache, a feature enabled by OptiNAND, which offers the best of both write cache enabled (WCE) and write cache disabled (WCD) modes. In the event of an EPO, the DRAM cache will be safely written in either mode, ensuring data protection and comparable performance across both WCE and WCD modes. Until Western Digital release further information on these new drives (official data sheets and/or live demonstrations) we will have to wait a little longer for more information on the abilities of these new high-performance SAS drives.

Are Dual Actuator HDDs Better or Worse than 10K or 15K RPM HDDs in Speed or Storage?

Dual Actuator HDDs aim to solve IOPS/TB constraints in systems that are currently using high-capacity 3.5-inch nearline HDDs, whereas 10K/15K mission-critical HDDs (such as the WD Velociraptor of the past) have much smaller capacities of around 2.4TB/900GB top capacities, respectively and are intended for servers. 10K and 15K hard drives differ from dual actuator hard drives in the way they access data on the disk platters. 10K and 15K hard drives use a single actuator to access the data on the disk platters, but do so up to twice as fast as dual actuator HDDs. However, dual actuator drives can handle more input/output operations per second, making them a good choice for demanding applications. There is the negligible benefit of Improved data integrity (i.e If one actuator fails, the other can still access the data on the disk platters, reducing the risk of data loss), but the main benefit/difference is that the dual arms allow a greater frequency of access in read and write overall. The popularity of 10K and 15K HDDs has dropped noticeably in recent years, thanks in part to the improvements NAND durability in SSD technology making them significantly more acceptable in warm/hot data archives – though they cannot hit the capacity of HDDs (NAND costs and physical PCB space), so dual Actuator HDDs are WD’s response to this growing disparity!

When will the WD Ultrastar DC HS760 HDD Be Available?

Although WD Ultrastar DC HS760 Hard Drives have been revealed, it is still very early! They have been listed on the company’s official store, but no price has been provided at this time (as well as no datasheet being made available at this time). Most likely, the first wave of units being made available will be extended to existing data centers (likely already well underway) and as this is a highly data-center class HDD, it will be surprising if this HDD is widely commercially available for a while yet! Watch this space and hopefully, we will get a chance to review this remarkably exciting HDD later in 2023 here on NASCompares.

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Technology is moving FAST! Yet one of the most overlooked fast-moving areas of technology in the market is data storage! In the last decade we have seen data storage averages used by consumers and businesses hugely multiply in volume and frequency, with hardware providers rushing to meet this demand. Because storage scales have increased so rapidly and the limitations of ‘local’ data access have long since been abandoned in favour of remote sever and cloud services, the result is that brands like Synology (pretty much the no #1 Network Attached Storage provider in the world) and WD (arguably one of the biggest hard drive manufacturers in the world) have been producing high quality and high-performance solutions to support this. Today I want to talk about two of each respective brand’s business targetted 2022 releases, combine them and give you some idea of just want they can do! In this article, I will be taking the Synology DS1522+ Ryzen-powered NAS for a spin, alongside four of the new WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drives, in order to see the performance we can expect in a wide range of configurations. In today’s article I hope to identify the following:

• The impact of different RAID configurations (with their different parity and redundancy calculations) on performance
• Identifying the performance differences between small and large file volumes/frequency in overall throughput
• Measuring the improvements in the performance of the WD Red Pro 22TB HDDs as multiple are in a RAID (performance increase as multiple drives Read/Write simultaneously)
• Testing external throughput with both a 5GbE connection and 10GbE connection to identify the point of network saturation
• Finally, to see if the DS1522+ more streamlined architecture is enough to support and perform at peak with the WD Red Pro 22TB Hard Disks

Skip Ahead? Use the links here to skip ahead to the Appropriate Test:

1. RAID 5, 5GbE Testing
2. RAID 0, 10GbE Testing
3. RAID 5, 10GbE Testing

Before we get started, if you are interested in emulating these tests for yourself, or are keen to achieve these results in your own setup and want to know the devices I used in these tests, you can use the links below to find each item on Amazon in your local region. Using these links will result in amazon sending a small % back to us here at NASCompares that goes directly back into our site and services, allowing us to continue making these articles, videos and more – Thanks in advance!

Note – If you would rather WATCH these tests in video form, you can watch the WD Red 22TB and Synology DS1522+ NAS Performance Tests here on the NASCompares YouTube Channel.

Synology DS1522+ & WD Red Pro 22TBs – The Test Setup and Hardware Used

These tests were conducted in a Windows 10 client machine environment over 3 days (factoring RAID rebuild times and cool downs). Although the DS1522+ NAS is a 5 bay NAS system, I was only able to secure four 22TB WD Red Pro HDDs, so that needs to be factored in. That said, the performance measurements of even 4 of these drives was still remarkably impressive for mechanical hard disks. The benchmark software used for these tests was Atto Disk Benchmark, as it provides a very wide range of test setups – as well as working much more smoothly with iSCSI targets/LUNs in windows and providing clearly information to display to the layman for this article. Lastly, I included a barrage of 5GbE network tests because, although current no Synology NAS hardware in the market features 5GbE network architecture, there is an increasing vogue for hardware client devices (PCs, Macs, etc) to have their network connections easily upgraded to 2.5G and 5G with USB adapters (for as little as £25) ensuring that a 10GbE connected NAS can be shared to a full extent with connected clients. Here is a breakdown of the specific test setup components:

• Synology DS1522+ 5-Bay NAS, E10G22-T1-mini 10GbE Adapter, DSM 7.1

• WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drives x4, RAID 0 or RAID 5 Configuration (depending on the test)

• 20TB iSCSI LUN via the Default iSCSI Manager Target, connected to the Windows PC with the iSCSI initiator as a local appearing drive for Atto Disk Benchmark

• Local PC Network Adapter USB-to-5GbE Adaper and a Thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter (depending on the test requirements)

• Windows 10 Pro PC, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.20 GHz, 32GB DDR4 2666Mhz Memory, Internal Samsung 970 Pro 1TB SSD

• MTU / Jumbo Frames set to 9K on both the NAS and the Network Adapter, Direct Connection (LAN-to-LAN), no network switch

Before we go further though, we need something to measure against. Here is the default performance of a SINGLE WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drive, using the Synology DSM Storage Manager Benchmark Tool:

As you can see, even on it’s own, a single WD Red Pro 22TB HDD can largely saturate even a single external 2.5GbE connection (though, most Synology arrive with 1GbE or 10Gbe). So, at the very least, you are going to get 240-260MB/s with just the one drive. So, let’s get down to business! I performed a wide scope of tests, so let’s go through those results!

Synology DS1522+ NAS, RAID 5, 5GbE Performance Tests

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 374MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 427MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 377MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 426MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 371MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 426MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 371MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 425MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 365MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 426MB/s

Synology DS1522+ NAS, RAID 0, 10GbE Performance Tests

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 856MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 841MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 847MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 864MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 851MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

Synology DS1522+ NAS, RAID 5, 10GbE Performance Tests

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 962MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 965MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 663MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 786MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 720MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 993MB/s

QNAP TS-464 NAS + WD Red 22TB RAID 6 Tests – Verdict & Conclusion

Overall, I was tremendously impressed with both the WD Red Pro 22TB drives AND the Synology DS1522+ NAS in these tests. My big takeaways from these tests were:

• Despite the AMD Ryzen R1600 being a Dual Core Processor, it was easily able to handle even the heavy 16GB, RAID 5 performance tests with little system impact
• The four 22TB Red Pro Hard Drives were particularly impressive, given they were able to able to fully saturate the 10GbE connection at numerous points
• The drives and NAS in these tests tended to favour the Read performance, though Write performance was still great.

Of course, it is always worth remembering that these tests were based on synthetic scenarios that were generated by a benchmarking tool. So these do not necessarily translate directly into the results that you will get with my unregulated and general ad hoc use. However, there are still fantastic results for this NAS+HDD drive combo, especially at this more compact scale. If you want to watch these tests in video form, you can use the YouTube publication below:

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this helpful and that it really helped you to make the most of your storage. Want to help me continue to make more guides, reviews and tutorials on the subject of NAS? Then you can do so in a few different ways (any of which I will be eternally grateful for if you choose to!). You can visit the ‘Support NAS Passion’ page HERE and see a few different ways that you can help us keep the lights on. Alternatively, you can use one of the links below to shop for your hardware today or in future (visiting those sites via the link below ensures that we get a mall commission on absolutely anything you purchase – and doesn’t cost you anything extra). Finally, if you want to support us in spirit rather than financially, recommend our blog to a friend or professional colleague or share a link on your social media site of choice. Thank you for reading and have a fantastic week!

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If you like this service, please consider supporting us. We use affiliate links on the blog allowing NAScompares information and advice service to be free of charge to you.Anything you purchase on the day you click on our links will generate a small commission which isused to run the website. Here is a link for Amazon and B&H.You can also get me a Ko-fi or old school Paypal. Thanks!To find out more about how to support this advice service check HEREIf you need to fix or configure a NAS, check Fiver Have you thought about helping others with your knowledge? Find Instructions Here  

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You really have to stop and marvel at the speed at which hard drives and storage, in general, grow every year. Despite the established rule of Moore’s law that these things double in size every two years, the very idea that Western Digital and their larger-scale NAS-focused WD Red Pro series of hard drives has now hit 20TB with the WD201KFGX is still a heck of an achievement (lest we forget that 22TB was also unveiled a month ago). Yet, in line with all this growth in storage, consumers’ and businesses’ appetite for storage continues to grow too and as big as 20TB of free space sounds, it is surprisingly easy for some to contemplate how they might fill it. Then you have to consider factors such as redundancy to prevent data loss in the event of failure, large-scale servers increasing the operational pressure on storage media, as well as the ability of any hard drive to withstand it all 24×7 and you can see why the WD Red Pro 20TB NAS hard drive has a great deal to live up to. The Red 20TB hard drive makes some bold promises in performance and robust design and with a price tag that very home users will be able to stomach, the direction for this drive towards business and enterprise use is understandable. So today, let’s review the WD Red Pro 20TB NAS hard drive, discuss how it is possible and ultimately help you decide if it deserves your data.

WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Quick Conclusion

The WD Red Pro 20TB is another great example of the brand’s continued investment in the NAS storage media industry that, although at its core a very functional item, still fulfils the promises and claims that the brand makes on it. The NAS hard drive market has become CONSIDERABLY busier and more populated in the decade or more since Western Digital unveiled their NAS storage media focus WD Red series, yet this Pro series 20TB offer still continues to maintain a high standard in its architecture and performance. The price tag is certainly quite brutal and although part of this stems from continued hardware and component shortages around the world, this is still a drive that is going to trade on its a rarity to a degree for a while. I say this because there are lower price alternatives for 20TB and server use right now from Western Digital themselves from the likes of the hyperscale and data centre-class UltraStar HC560 20TB, released a short while before the WD Red Pro 20TB, with similar architecture. Nevertheless, if your budget can cover the WD Red Pro 20TB, you have a larger scale NAS solution in mind and have no qualms about drive noise in it’s more sustained access periods, you cannot fault the WD Red Pro 20TB hard drive.

BUILD - 10/10

HARDWARE - 9/10

PERFORMANCE - 9/10

PRICE - 8/10

VALUE - 8/10

8.8

PROS

20TB in a single 3.5\" drive is insane, even for 2022
OptiNAND concept and execution present performance and power-loss benefits
NAS Server tailored HDDs are always a good thing for 24x7 deployment
Good, solid internal hardware architecture at 7200RPM and 512MB traditional cache buffer
Solid, if expected, 300TB workload rating
5yr warranty and good brand reputation for replacements & Support
The 20TB Drives are (very) gradually appearing on NAS Compatibility Lists

CONS

Even if you break it down to Price per TB, it IS a very expensive HDD
Not a quiet drive when in random active use
The sequential data transfer rating is a fraction lower than the 18TB Red Pro

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WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Specifications

The hardware architecture of the WD Red Pro 20TB NAS hard drive is a combination of everything that we have seen in previous revisions of this long-running drive media series, combined with a new method of drive and data metadata management. This drive errs away from the energy-assisted magnetic recording of the Ultrastar 20TB released earlier in 2022, instead managing to provide this herculean 20 terabytes of storage via traditional conventional magnetic recording. It does this with data being split across nine 2.2TB platters internally, spinning 7200RPM and with 512MB of onboard cache for buffering. The Pro moniker in the model ID is based on portfolio separation in the WD Red series (featuring WD Red, WD Red Plus and WD Red Pro) with this new 20TB NAS HDD being heavily aimed at a larger scale business use. This architecture (along with the noise and vibration protection being handled by 3D Active Balance and geared with the NASWare 3.0 firmware) allows a 300TB per year workload rating, (data center class is 550TB), a 1 million hours MTBF rating and the brand including a 5-year warranty with the drive. Below is a greater breakdown of the WD Red Pro 20TB specifications:

What is OptiNAND and Why is it so Important?

Of course, users who have been following the developments of WD in their roadmaps and reveals of larger-scale drive media will be aware that the WD Red Pro 20TB also features a new technological design being rolled out in these bigger drives to merge existing storage technologies into something even better – OptiNAND. This is a new approach to an old idea that never really took off, where the benefits of small areas of faster NAND storage (more typically associated with SSD media) and affords a small area of NAND to a larger scale hard drive to be used for metadata and for storing data in the event of power failure. Flash is also interesting from a persistence standpoint. DRAM gets flushed on power loss, but NAND is non-volatile and can continue to keep metadata information without having to re-hydrate after a boot sequence, be removed from the system for some reason, or any other event where power drops. The WD Red Pro 20TB hard drive (much like other Western Digital 20TB drives currently) arrives with a portion of 64-layer/64GB BICS3 (3D TLC)

WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.

The slice of iNAND has its own dedicated controller, much like an SSD. While metadata management itself doesn’t help to increase platter density, it enables a range of benefits that do. As one can imagine, the higher the density of the HDD, the more metadata it generates. Moving metadata to a fast, dense and scalable storage area gives more freedom for manufacturers to create higher capacity drives.

OptiNAND	DRAM

But why choose NAND over DRAM? Western Digital explained back in August 2021 that modern high-density HDDs generate gigabytes of metadata and it’s too costly to include sufficient  DRAM to hold it. In addition, moving metadata to their own dedicated area will free up more space on the platters themselves to store user data. There’s more to it than capacity increases, though; using OptiNAND also helps with reliability, specifically with the repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI).

WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Design

The design of the WD Red Pro 20TB Hard drive is quite uniform when compared to the 16TB and 18TB versions of the same drive. The green PCB seemed the tiniest pinch thinner and less pronounced in this drive – likely due to every single millimetre counting in efforts to ensure that the drive is still a standard sized 3.5″ class HDD. Indeed, the newest generation of hard drives (i.e ones that use larger numbers of platters and helium sealing) tend to be considerably more solid and industrial in appearance than ever.

The top of the WD Red Pro has the usual branded logos, technical details, firmware identification and date of production. The 20TB entries into the popular WD Red NAS media range have arrived remarkably quickly with this drive being produced less than two months before the writing of this review. For a while, WD was noticeably slower on rolling out larger capacities since the 12TB and 14TB drive era, but in the last couple of storage tiers they have caught up considerably with their release frequency.

The sides of the WD Red Pro 20TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 268MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Red Pro) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens.

The bulk of that area is occupied by those nine platters that are being read by a triple-stage actuator (an advancement on the standard arm that engages with the platters to retrieve data). This TSA means that errors and performance issues that can be associated with disks built on denser drive platters are hugely negated. Whether you are looking at NAS drives, SAN/Data-Center drives or even regular single deployment domestic hard drives, the bigger the drive in capacity, the more susceptible a drive can be to even the smallest vibration or shock passing through it from the host system. How does the WD Red Pro 20TB counter this?

The WD201KFGX 20TB (much like the rest of the WD Red and WD Red Pro series in the larger capacities) hugely benefits from the multi-axis shocker sensor and 3D active balance plus in the framework and firmware of the HDD, which means the drive’s heads and platters have their generated vibration and ambient shock/vibration from the larger NAS RAID configuration monitored and the drive proactively balances its performance. In short, this means that the drive can be more dynamic internally as surrounding system stress changes. Overall, what you have here is a very, VERY sturdy HDD. So, let’s see how that build quality translates into performance.

WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Testing

Testing the WD Red Pro 20TB is going to be performed across multiple methods, but still rather unconventional. This drive is designed for deployment in 8+ Bay servers and higher and although I have several NAS in the studio that could accommodate this frequency of drives, I do not have multiple WD Red Pro 20TB units. Therefore the testing I have conducted are all examples of single-drive performance. These will include several PC testing sessions using popular and recommended storage testing applications and two NAS tests involving Synology and QNAP.

• Windows 10 Pro Desktop System
• Intel i5 11400 Rocket Lake – 6-Core 2.6/4.4Ghz
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory
• Intel B560M mATX Motherboard
• OS Storage, Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD
• Test Hard Drive connected to a Sabrent USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gb/s external dock
• Synology test was conducted on a DS920+ and DS2422+ NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool
• QNAP test was conducted on a TS-464 NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool

These last tests are important as not only is the WD Red Pro 20TB HDD designed for NAS use, but also at the time of writing neither brand lists this hard drive as compatible. There is more to this though that I will touch on later.

The first test involved using AJA. This test was using a 1GB test file (one test using a 1080p format and another being a massive 5K media file test). Unlike previous tests of SSDs here on NASCompares, a 16GB file over a SATA HDD will take quite a while and although it would be interesting to see how the WD Red Pro 20TB drive performs with this sustained largely sequential operation, I left heavy operations to later in the test routines.

Next, I performed a quick test on CrystalDiskMark using a 1GB test file, as well as mixed 70/30% R/W. The results were consistent and lived upto WD’s claims here.

The next test was using ATTO disk benchmark and this one was using a 1GB and 4GB test file in the same windows PC test environment. However, this test was focused more on the IOPS. The random 4K operations of a hard drive will typically be hugely dwarfed by those of HDDs, but enterprise HDDs and pro series drives still tend to rate noticeably higher than domestic HDD and standard class NAS HDDs on this score.

Finally, I conducted a straightforward transfer onto the HDD using Windows File Explorer. This was done with a folder filled with a little over 20GB of mixed file types and volumes (2,250 files across 71 folders). This transfer took a fraction under 2 mins:

Synology & QNAP NAS Testing with the WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive

Now, before I move on to the NAS testing. It is worth highlighting a couple of important factors with regard to the WD Red Pro 20TB and the support available from each NAS brand I am focusing on for the testing. Now, Synology is the ONLY NAS brand in the market that also has its own first-party HDDs available to users too. These are Originally Toshiba Enterprise-grade produced hard disks that have had a Synology-specific firmware applied to them. Now, why is this relevant? Well, because some larger-scale Synology products in 2022 onwards do not list other 3rd Party HDDs as compatible. Even then, if you look up some of the older 2020 released NAS drives currently in the market (such as the DS920+ for example), they DO list HDDs from the likes of Western Digital (and their WD Red, Ultrastar and Gold series) BUT they do not list drives larger than 16TB at the time of writing. This is an odd stance by the brand, when larger-scale 18TB and 20TB hard drives are available in the market and designed for NAS.

If you install an HDD or SSD inside a Synology system with the latest version of their software platform DSM, but the HDD in question is not on the compatibility list, you are greeted by a message that will detail that the drive is not recommended in the storage manager. You can still use the HDD for Storage Pools, Volumes, Hot-spares, etc, but it is an oddly jarring message for some.

Of course, this is the current compatibility of this HDD at the time of writing and may well change in the future as further HDD capacities arrive and additional compatibility testing takes place.

Nevertheless, you can still push through this warning and proceed to testing the performance of the WD Red Pro 20TB HDD from within the Synology Storage Manager. Here was the results.

The HDD compatibility of the WD Red Pro 20TB Hard drive on the QNAP NAS platform is less complicated (eg the 18TB HDDs from most brands are listed) but at the time of writing the 20TB models are still not on the available list of compatible HDDs (again, this will likely be addressed shortly after commercial launch). Here is how the drive is benchmarked and appeared in the QNAP NAS system.

Noise Testing the WD Red Pro 20TB NAS Hard Drive

Another factor that is all too often overlooked is the noise that is generated by pro and enterprise-class hard drives. Because these larger capacity and more durable drives are built to provide as high a performance as possible, as well as survive the rigours of more industrial deployment, they end up being noticeably noisier in use. Now, in larger rackmount installations, the noise of the NAS system fans and operation will easily drown out the noise of HDDs. However, these things are much, much different in smaller-scale deployment. Now that most HDD brands have shifted their portfolios to only include 14/16TB media and higher to only exist in their Pro/Enterprise class tiers, those buying more modest NAS systems in the 1-8-Bay scale will be much more likely to hear the noise of these more enduring HDDs. The WD Red Pro 20TB is not an especially quiet drive when in operation, even in idle. Here is how the drive sounds when the drive is powered on and on idle/standby (i.e no active file processes):

WD Red Pro 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – IDLE (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

And here is how the WD Red Pro 20TB sounds when the HDD is being HEAVILY accessed. using a benchmarking tool and extensive random 4K IOPS in read/write testing. Note, the higher the frequency of files, the noisier it will be, as the actuator inside will be working considerably hardware to allocate the small size/high frequency of data to the platters):

WD Red Pro 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – HEAVY ACCESS (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

Once again, if you are deploying this in a larger than 8-Bay NAS system (especially rackmount, but desktop too), then the clicks, hums and whirs of the WD Red Pro 20TB will not be especially noticeable above the general active fan noise of the host NAS system. But in smaller deployments and especially in setups where you will be in closer proximity with the NAS, this HDD will be especially noticeable and larger RAID NAS arrays will exacerbate the noise.

WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Conclusion

The WD Red Pro 20TB is another great example of the brand’s continued investment in the NAS storage media industry that, although at its core a very functional item, still fulfils the promises and claims that the brand makes on it. The NAS hard drive market has become CONSIDERABLY busier and more populated in the decade or more since Western Digital unveiled their NAS storage media focus WD Red series, yet this Pro series 20TB offer still continues to maintain a high standard in its architecture and performance. The price tag is certainly quite brutal and although part of this stems from continued hardware and component shortages around the world, this is still a drive that is going to trade on its a rarity to a degree for a while. I say this because there are lower price alternatives for 20TB and server use right now from Western Digital themselves from the likes of the hyperscale and data centre-class UltraStar HC560 20TB, released a short while before the WD Red Pro 20TB, with similar architecture. Nevertheless, if your budget can cover the WD Red Pro 20TB, you have a larger scale NAS solution in mind and have no qualms about drive noise in it’s more sustained access periods, you cannot fault the WD Red Pro 20TB hard drive.

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You really have to stop and marvel at the speed at which hard drives and storage, in general, grow every year. Despite the established rule of Moore’s law that these things double in size every two years, the very idea that Western Digital and their larger-scale NAS-focused WD Red Pro series of hard drives has now hit 20TB with the WD201KFGX is still a heck of an achievement (lest we forget that 22TB was also unveiled a month ago). Yet, in line with all this growth in storage, consumers’ and businesses’ appetite for storage continues to grow too and as big as 20TB of free space sounds, it is surprisingly easy for some to contemplate how they might fill it. Then you have to consider factors such as redundancy to prevent data loss in the event of failure, large-scale servers increasing the operational pressure on storage media, as well as the ability of any hard drive to withstand it all 24×7 and you can see why the WD Red Pro 20TB NAS hard drive has a great deal to live up to. The Red 20TB hard drive makes some bold promises in performance and robust design and with a price tag that very home users will be able to stomach, the direction for this drive towards business and enterprise use is understandable. So today, let’s review the WD Red Pro 20TB NAS hard drive, discuss how it is possible and ultimately help you decide if it deserves your data.

WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Quick Conclusion

The WD Red Pro 20TB is another great example of the brand’s continued investment in the NAS storage media industry that, although at its core a very functional item, still fulfils the promises and claims that the brand makes on it. The NAS hard drive market has become CONSIDERABLY busier and more populated in the decade or more since Western Digital unveiled their NAS storage media focus WD Red series, yet this Pro series 20TB offer still continues to maintain a high standard in its architecture and performance. The price tag is certainly quite brutal and although part of this stems from continued hardware and component shortages around the world, this is still a drive that is going to trade on its a rarity to a degree for a while. I say this because there are lower price alternatives for 20TB and server use right now from Western Digital themselves from the likes of the hyperscale and data centre-class UltraStar HC560 20TB, released a short while before the WD Red Pro 20TB, with similar architecture. Nevertheless, if your budget can cover the WD Red Pro 20TB, you have a larger scale NAS solution in mind and have no qualms about drive noise in it’s more sustained access periods, you cannot fault the WD Red Pro 20TB hard drive.

BUILD - 10/10

HARDWARE - 9/10

PERFORMANCE - 9/10

PRICE - 8/10

VALUE - 8/10

8.8

PROS

20TB in a single 3.5\" drive is insane, even for 2022
OptiNAND concept and execution present performance and power-loss benefits
NAS Server tailored HDDs are always a good thing for 24x7 deployment
Good, solid internal hardware architecture at 7200RPM and 512MB traditional cache buffer
Solid, if expected, 300TB workload rating
5yr warranty and good brand reputation for replacements & Support
The 20TB Drives are (very) gradually appearing on NAS Compatibility Lists

CONS

Even if you break it down to Price per TB, it IS a very expensive HDD
Not a quiet drive when in random active use
The sequential data transfer rating is a fraction lower than the 18TB Red Pro

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WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Specifications

The hardware architecture of the WD Red Pro 20TB NAS hard drive is a combination of everything that we have seen in previous revisions of this long-running drive media series, combined with a new method of drive and data metadata management. This drive errs away from the energy-assisted magnetic recording of the Ultrastar 20TB released earlier in 2022, instead managing to provide this herculean 20 terabytes of storage via traditional conventional magnetic recording. It does this with data being split across nine 2.2TB platters internally, spinning 7200RPM and with 512MB of onboard cache for buffering. The Pro moniker in the model ID is based on portfolio separation in the WD Red series (featuring WD Red, WD Red Plus and WD Red Pro) with this new 20TB NAS HDD being heavily aimed at a larger scale business use. This architecture (along with the noise and vibration protection being handled by 3D Active Balance and geared with the NASWare 3.0 firmware) allows a 300TB per year workload rating, (data center class is 550TB), a 1 million hours MTBF rating and the brand including a 5-year warranty with the drive. Below is a greater breakdown of the WD Red Pro 20TB specifications:

What is OptiNAND and Why is it so Important?

Of course, users who have been following the developments of WD in their roadmaps and reveals of larger-scale drive media will be aware that the WD Red Pro 20TB also features a new technological design being rolled out in these bigger drives to merge existing storage technologies into something even better – OptiNAND. This is a new approach to an old idea that never really took off, where the benefits of small areas of faster NAND storage (more typically associated with SSD media) and affords a small area of NAND to a larger scale hard drive to be used for metadata and for storing data in the event of power failure. Flash is also interesting from a persistence standpoint. DRAM gets flushed on power loss, but NAND is non-volatile and can continue to keep metadata information without having to re-hydrate after a boot sequence, be removed from the system for some reason, or any other event where power drops. The WD Red Pro 20TB hard drive (much like other Western Digital 20TB drives currently) arrives with a portion of 64-layer/64GB BICS3 (3D TLC)

WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.

The slice of iNAND has its own dedicated controller, much like an SSD. While metadata management itself doesn’t help to increase platter density, it enables a range of benefits that do. As one can imagine, the higher the density of the HDD, the more metadata it generates. Moving metadata to a fast, dense and scalable storage area gives more freedom for manufacturers to create higher capacity drives.

OptiNAND	DRAM

But why choose NAND over DRAM? Western Digital explained back in August 2021 that modern high-density HDDs generate gigabytes of metadata and it’s too costly to include sufficient  DRAM to hold it. In addition, moving metadata to their own dedicated area will free up more space on the platters themselves to store user data. There’s more to it than capacity increases, though; using OptiNAND also helps with reliability, specifically with the repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI).

WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Design

The design of the WD Red Pro 20TB Hard drive is quite uniform when compared to the 16TB and 18TB versions of the same drive. The green PCB seemed the tiniest pinch thinner and less pronounced in this drive – likely due to every single millimetre counting in efforts to ensure that the drive is still a standard sized 3.5″ class HDD. Indeed, the newest generation of hard drives (i.e ones that use larger numbers of platters and helium sealing) tend to be considerably more solid and industrial in appearance than ever.

The top of the WD Red Pro has the usual branded logos, technical details, firmware identification and date of production. The 20TB entries into the popular WD Red NAS media range have arrived remarkably quickly with this drive being produced less than two months before the writing of this review. For a while, WD was noticeably slower on rolling out larger capacities since the 12TB and 14TB drive era, but in the last couple of storage tiers they have caught up considerably with their release frequency.

The sides of the WD Red Pro 20TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 268MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Red Pro) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens.

The bulk of that area is occupied by those nine platters that are being read by a triple-stage actuator (an advancement on the standard arm that engages with the platters to retrieve data). This TSA means that errors and performance issues that can be associated with disks built on denser drive platters are hugely negated. Whether you are looking at NAS drives, SAN/Data-Center drives or even regular single deployment domestic hard drives, the bigger the drive in capacity, the more susceptible a drive can be to even the smallest vibration or shock passing through it from the host system. How does the WD Red Pro 20TB counter this?

The WD201KFGX 20TB (much like the rest of the WD Red and WD Red Pro series in the larger capacities) hugely benefits from the multi-axis shocker sensor and 3D active balance plus in the framework and firmware of the HDD, which means the drive’s heads and platters have their generated vibration and ambient shock/vibration from the larger NAS RAID configuration monitored and the drive proactively balances its performance. In short, this means that the drive can be more dynamic internally as surrounding system stress changes. Overall, what you have here is a very, VERY sturdy HDD. So, let’s see how that build quality translates into performance.

WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Testing

Testing the WD Red Pro 20TB is going to be performed across multiple methods, but still rather unconventional. This drive is designed for deployment in 8+ Bay servers and higher and although I have several NAS in the studio that could accommodate this frequency of drives, I do not have multiple WD Red Pro 20TB units. Therefore the testing I have conducted are all examples of single-drive performance. These will include several PC testing sessions using popular and recommended storage testing applications and two NAS tests involving Synology and QNAP.

• Windows 10 Pro Desktop System
• Intel i5 11400 Rocket Lake – 6-Core 2.6/4.4Ghz
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory
• Intel B560M mATX Motherboard
• OS Storage, Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD
• Test Hard Drive connected to a Sabrent USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gb/s external dock
• Synology test was conducted on a DS920+ and DS2422+ NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool
• QNAP test was conducted on a TS-464 NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool

These last tests are important as not only is the WD Red Pro 20TB HDD designed for NAS use, but also at the time of writing neither brand lists this hard drive as compatible. There is more to this though that I will touch on later.

The first test involved using AJA. This test was using a 1GB test file (one test using a 1080p format and another being a massive 5K media file test). Unlike previous tests of SSDs here on NASCompares, a 16GB file over a SATA HDD will take quite a while and although it would be interesting to see how the WD Red Pro 20TB drive performs with this sustained largely sequential operation, I left heavy operations to later in the test routines.

Next, I performed a quick test on CrystalDiskMark using a 1GB test file, as well as mixed 70/30% R/W. The results were consistent and lived upto WD’s claims here.

The next test was using ATTO disk benchmark and this one was using a 1GB and 4GB test file in the same windows PC test environment. However, this test was focused more on the IOPS. The random 4K operations of a hard drive will typically be hugely dwarfed by those of HDDs, but enterprise HDDs and pro series drives still tend to rate noticeably higher than domestic HDD and standard class NAS HDDs on this score.

Finally, I conducted a straightforward transfer onto the HDD using Windows File Explorer. This was done with a folder filled with a little over 20GB of mixed file types and volumes (2,250 files across 71 folders). This transfer took a fraction under 2 mins:

Synology & QNAP NAS Testing with the WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive

Now, before I move on to the NAS testing. It is worth highlighting a couple of important factors with regard to the WD Red Pro 20TB and the support available from each NAS brand I am focusing on for the testing. Now, Synology is the ONLY NAS brand in the market that also has its own first-party HDDs available to users too. These are Originally Toshiba Enterprise-grade produced hard disks that have had a Synology-specific firmware applied to them. Now, why is this relevant? Well, because some larger-scale Synology products in 2022 onwards do not list other 3rd Party HDDs as compatible. Even then, if you look up some of the older 2020 released NAS drives currently in the market (such as the DS920+ for example), they DO list HDDs from the likes of Western Digital (and their WD Red, Ultrastar and Gold series) BUT they do not list drives larger than 16TB at the time of writing. This is an odd stance by the brand, when larger-scale 18TB and 20TB hard drives are available in the market and designed for NAS.

If you install an HDD or SSD inside a Synology system with the latest version of their software platform DSM, but the HDD in question is not on the compatibility list, you are greeted by a message that will detail that the drive is not recommended in the storage manager. You can still use the HDD for Storage Pools, Volumes, Hot-spares, etc, but it is an oddly jarring message for some.

Of course, this is the current compatibility of this HDD at the time of writing and may well change in the future as further HDD capacities arrive and additional compatibility testing takes place.

Nevertheless, you can still push through this warning and proceed to testing the performance of the WD Red Pro 20TB HDD from within the Synology Storage Manager. Here was the results.

The HDD compatibility of the WD Red Pro 20TB Hard drive on the QNAP NAS platform is less complicated (eg the 18TB HDDs from most brands are listed) but at the time of writing the 20TB models are still not on the available list of compatible HDDs (again, this will likely be addressed shortly after commercial launch). Here is how the drive is benchmarked and appeared in the QNAP NAS system.

Noise Testing the WD Red Pro 20TB NAS Hard Drive

Another factor that is all too often overlooked is the noise that is generated by pro and enterprise-class hard drives. Because these larger capacity and more durable drives are built to provide as high a performance as possible, as well as survive the rigours of more industrial deployment, they end up being noticeably noisier in use. Now, in larger rackmount installations, the noise of the NAS system fans and operation will easily drown out the noise of HDDs. However, these things are much, much different in smaller-scale deployment. Now that most HDD brands have shifted their portfolios to only include 14/16TB media and higher to only exist in their Pro/Enterprise class tiers, those buying more modest NAS systems in the 1-8-Bay scale will be much more likely to hear the noise of these more enduring HDDs. The WD Red Pro 20TB is not an especially quiet drive when in operation, even in idle. Here is how the drive sounds when the drive is powered on and on idle/standby (i.e no active file processes):

WD Red Pro 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – IDLE (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

And here is how the WD Red Pro 20TB sounds when the HDD is being HEAVILY accessed. using a benchmarking tool and extensive random 4K IOPS in read/write testing. Note, the higher the frequency of files, the noisier it will be, as the actuator inside will be working considerably hardware to allocate the small size/high frequency of data to the platters):

WD Red Pro 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – HEAVY ACCESS (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

Once again, if you are deploying this in a larger than 8-Bay NAS system (especially rackmount, but desktop too), then the clicks, hums and whirs of the WD Red Pro 20TB will not be especially noticeable above the general active fan noise of the host NAS system. But in smaller deployments and especially in setups where you will be in closer proximity with the NAS, this HDD will be especially noticeable and larger RAID NAS arrays will exacerbate the noise.

WD Red Pro 20TB Hard Drive Review – Conclusion

The WD Red Pro 20TB is another great example of the brand’s continued investment in the NAS storage media industry that, although at its core a very functional item, still fulfils the promises and claims that the brand makes on it. The NAS hard drive market has become CONSIDERABLY busier and more populated in the decade or more since Western Digital unveiled their NAS storage media focus WD Red series, yet this Pro series 20TB offer still continues to maintain a high standard in its architecture and performance. The price tag is certainly quite brutal and although part of this stems from continued hardware and component shortages around the world, this is still a drive that is going to trade on its a rarity to a degree for a while. I say this because there are lower price alternatives for 20TB and server use right now from Western Digital themselves from the likes of the hyperscale and data centre-class UltraStar HC560 20TB, released a short while before the WD Red Pro 20TB, with similar architecture. Nevertheless, if your budget can cover the WD Red Pro 20TB, you have a larger scale NAS solution in mind and have no qualms about drive noise in it’s more sustained access periods, you cannot fault the WD Red Pro 20TB hard drive.

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Finally, for free advice about your setup, just leave a message in the comments below here at NASCompares.com and we will get back to you. Need Help? Where possible (and where appropriate) please provide as much information about your requirements, as then I can arrange the best answer and solution to your needs. Do not worry about your e-mail address being required, it will NOT be used in a mailing list and will NOT be used in any way other than to respond to your enquiry. [contact-form-7] TRY CHAT Terms and Conditions

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Alternatively, why not ask me on the ASK NASCompares forum, by clicking the button below. This is a community hub that serves as a place that I can answer your question, chew the fat, share new release information and even get corrections posted. I will always get around to answering ALL queries, but as a one-man operation, I cannot promise speed! So by sharing your query in the ASK NASCompares section below, you can get a better range of solutions and suggestions, alongside my own.

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The speed at which Hard Drive technology has evolved has been pretty crazy. Not so long ago, many highly respected journals and tech sites were signing the death warrant of Hard drives, largely down to the growing affordability of SSDs, NAND storage capacity and durability increasing and all the while HDDs plodding along with only relatively small improvements in their performance and cost. However, fast forward to 2022 and not only are HDDs still a ‘thing’ but, they continue to flourish! Why is this? Well, simply that the amount of data we as individuals and/or businesses is constantly increasing in volume, but so does the expected speed at which we demand access to it. SSDs give you great speed, but still cannot affordably match the price point per TB or even Petabyte of HDDs and in this world, a drive like the Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC560 20TB hard drive is going to be perfect. Designed with large-scale data center deployment in mind, the HC560 is a monster of a hard disk that includes a large number of innovations by WD to improve stability, performance, access times and workloads compared with regular desktop or NAS class HDDs. So, today I want to discuss the new Western Digital DC HC560 20TB, what makes it different to a Pro class drive, who it is designed for, who it ISN’T designed for and ultimately help you decide if it deserves your data. Let’s go.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Quick Conclusion

The Western Digital DC HC560 does exactly what it sets out to achieve. This is an incredibly robust hard drive that you can tell WD has poured alot of that enterprise audience R&D into! The fact that it is 20TB is always going to be impressive, but the real draw here is that this high degree of storage capacity has been achieved, without SMR and without compromising it’s performance and use in a larger RAID environment. HDDs are still in popular industry use and until the ongoing demand for Large Affordable Capacity AND fast access continues, you can see why most popular hard drive brands are predicted to comfortably hit 50TB by the end of the decade. The Western Digital DC HC560 20TB hard disk is a great piece of engineering that continues to support the continued popularity of the Ultrastar series for large-scale data center use. However, it is REALLY important to understand WHY this drive is DC/Data-Center classed and not appropriate for the average home user looking to get big capacity in a single drive. For a start, the Western Digital DC HC560 is a noisy drive! Alongside a higher power consumption to keep this industrial drive running 24×7, it is a drive designed for exceptional fast power on/spin up, as well as having a nine spinning platters to dance between all the time, so it makes alot of humming, spinning, vibrating and clicking noises throughout it’s operations – in a data center, fulling populating a 24 bay rackmount, you won’t hear it. But in a modest home 2-4-Bay system, it sounds horrendous! Enterprise drives like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are designed for larger scale deployment and used in bulk (RAID configs), hence the lower price often when compared again NAS PRO drives like WD Red Pro. The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar is an exceptional Hyper-Scale storage hard drive, just don’t try to use it outside of those environments!

BUILD - 10/10

HARDWARE - 10/10

PERFORMANCE - 9/10

PRICE - 9/10

VALUE - 9/10

9.4

PROS

20TB for under £400 (i.e £20 per Terabyte, when the general market cost if £25-30) is an absolute solid WIN
Extremely well-constructed design
7200 + 512MB Cache + OptiNAND = Great hardware base to work with
Sustained performance in testing stayed above 250MB/s over extended periods
550TB Annual Workload and 2.5 Million hr MTBF (even if you aren\'t impressed by the latter scale in 2022) is huge;y impressive
Considerably more available to buy online that you would expect, considering its a Data Center HDD

CONS

Noisy!
Higher typical Power Use
1x 20TB drive, when you factor RAID = A larger, long-term financial commitment to backups/redundancy (often overlooked)

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WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Specifications

The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar 20TB hard drive is, unsurprisingly, not a drive that is built like the rest. Aside from the hefty task of storing 20TB of data, this is a drive that is designed for deployment in much more industrial arrays, in near limitless storage pools (rackmount, bolted onto rackmount, etc, etc) and will be in operation 24×7, with regular access and a higher % of data recycling as data moves between hot>warm>cold storage systems. This combined with the need for the drive to maintain a sustainable performance (not just hit a high peak transfer rate, but be able to maintain it without over-saturation over long, long periods of time. Then there is the expectations of lifespan on a HDD like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB, with the industry standard of 5 years really being a great deal more significantly when it comes to data center hardware.

Therefore, the hardware specifications of the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are similar to those found in the WD Red Pro 20TB drive released around the same time, however, there is a greater focus on annual workloads, durability and lifespan of the drive when in constant use. With most regular/normal server class drives arriving with a 180TB write workload per year, Pro series drive support upto 300TB and Western Digital DC HC560 series a whopping 550TB annually – hence the much longer MTBF hour rating of 2.5 million. This combined with fixed 7200RPM and massive 512MB cache means that this is a drive that will run faster, even under sustained high use and do so in significantly larger RAID configurations. This does also result in a higher power consumption in use, standby or idle modes, as well as a larger general vibration when in use and a higher noise level when the drive is in operation (which climbs even higher during larger frequency but low size/volume access periods – ie those larger IOPS measurement based operations). Then there is the inclusion of OptiNAND from WD on these larger 18TB and 20TB HDDs, which we will touch on in a moment. Before then though, here are the full specifications of the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB HDD:

What is OptiNAND and Why is it so Important?

Of course, users who have been following the developments of WD in their roadmaps and reveals of larger-scale drive media will be aware that the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB also features a new technological design being rolled out in these bigger drives to merge existing storage technologies into something even better – OptiNAND. This is a new approach to an old idea that never really took off, where the benefits of small areas of faster NAND storage (more typically associated with SSD media) and affords a small area of NAND to a larger scale hard drive to be used for metadata and for storing data in the event of power failure. Flash is also interesting from a persistence standpoint. DRAM gets flushed on power loss, but NAND is non-volatile and can continue to keep metadata information without having to re-hydrate after a boot sequence, be removed from the system for some reason, or any other event where power drops. The WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB hard drive (much like other Western Digital 20TB drives currently) arrives with a portion of 64-layer/64GB BICS3 (3D TLC)

WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.

The slice of iNAND has its own dedicated controller, much like an SSD. While metadata management itself doesn’t help to increase platter density, it enables a range of benefits that do. As one can imagine, the higher the density of the HDD, the more metadata it generates. Moving metadata to a fast, dense and scalable storage area gives more freedom for manufacturers to create higher capacity drives.

OptiNAND	DRAM

But why choose NAND over DRAM? Western Digital explained back in August 2021 that modern high-density HDDs generate gigabytes of metadata and it’s too costly to include sufficient  DRAM to hold it. In addition, moving metadata to their own dedicated area will free up more space on the platters themselves to store user data. There’s more to it than capacity increases, though; using OptiNAND also helps with reliability, specifically with the repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI).

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Design

The design of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard drive is quite uniform when compared to the 16TB and 18TB versions of the same drive. The green PCB seemed the tiniest pinch thinner and less pronounced in this drive – likely due to every single millimetre counting in efforts to ensure that the drive is still a standard sized 3.5″ class HDD. Indeed, the newest generation of hard drives (i.e ones that use larger numbers of platters and helium sealing) tend to be considerably more solid and industrial in appearance than ever.

The top of the DC HC560 has the usual branded logos, technical details, firmware identification and date of production. The 20TB entries into the highly industry-favoured WD Ultrastar DC media range have arrived remarkably quickly with this drive being produced less than two months before the writing of this review. For a while, WD was noticeably slower on rolling out larger capacities since the 12TB and 14TB drive era, but in the last couple of storage tiers they have caught up considerably with their release frequency.

The sides of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any SAN/NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 269MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Ultrastar HC560) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens. It is also worth highlighting that (much like the rest of the Ultrastar range) the DC 560 20TB is available in SAS too, as well as arriving in a few different encryption standards inside (SED – self-encrypted drive) for industries that need secure read/write and secure erasure as standard).

The bulk of that area is occupied by those nine platters that are being read by a triple-stage actuator (an advancement on the standard arm that engages with the platters to retrieve data). This TSA means that errors and performance issues that can be associated with disks built on denser drive platters are hugely negated. Whether you are looking at NAS drives, SAN/Data-Center drives or even regular single deployment domestic hard drives, the bigger the drive in capacity, the more susceptible a drive can be to even the smallest vibration or shock passing through it from the host system. How does the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB counter this?

The 0F38755 20TB (much like the rest of the WD Gold and WD Ultrastar DC ranges in the larger capacities) hugely benefits from the multi-axis shocker sensor and 3D active balance plus in the framework and firmware of the HDD, which means the drive’s heads and platters have their generated vibration and ambient shock/vibration from the larger 24×7 server RAID configuration monitored and the drive proactively balances its performance. In short, this means that the drive can be more dynamic internally as surrounding system stress changes. Overall, what you have here is a very, VERY sturdy HDD. So, let’s see how that build quality translates into performance.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Testing

Testing the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB is going to be performed across multiple methods, but still rather unconventional. This drive is designed for deployment in data center server environments of 12-24-36-48bays and higher. So, although I have several NAS in the studio that could accommodate frequencies of up to 12 bays of drives, I do not have multiple WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB units. Therefore the testing I have conducted are all examples of single-drive performance. These will include several PC testing sessions using popular and recommended storage testing applications and two NAS tests involving Synology and QNAP.

• Windows 10 Pro Desktop System
• Intel i5 11400 Rocket Lake – 6-Core 2.6/4.4Ghz
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory
• Intel B560M mATX Motherboard
• OS Storage, Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD
• Test Hard Drive connected to a Sabrent USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gb/s external dock
• Synology test was conducted on a DS920+ NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool (selected so we can isolate the sound level)
• QNAP test was conducted on a TS-464 NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool (once again, to isolate the Ultrastar DC HC560 Noise level from the larger NAS system)

These last tests are important as not only is the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB HDD designed for NAS use, but also at the time of writing neither brand lists this hard drive as compatible. There is more to this though that I will touch on later.

The first test involved using AJA. This test was using a 1GB and 256MB test file (one test using a 1080p format and another being a massive 4K media file test). Unlike previous tests of SSDs here on NASCompares, a 16GB fileover a SATA HDD will take quite a while and although it would be interesting to see how the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB drive performs with this sustained largely sequential operation, I left heavy operations to later in the test routines.

Next, I performed a quick test on CrystalDiskMark using a 64MB and 512MB test file, as well as mixed 70/30% R/W. The results were consistent and lived upto WD’s claims here.

The next test was using ATTO disk benchmark and this one was using a 1GB and 256MB test file in the same windows PC test environment. However, this test was focused more on the IOPS. The random 4K operations of a hard drive will typically be hugely dwarfed by those of HDDs, but enterprise HDDs and pro series drives still tend to rate noticeably higher than domestic HDD and standard class NAS HDDs on this score. It is also worth highlighting that the 4K Random IOPS tests hugely demonstrated the noise level that this system can hit – which we will touch on later.

Finally, I conducted a straightforward transfer onto the HDD using Windows File Explorer. This was done with a folder filled with a little over 20GB of mixed file types and volumes (2,250 files across 71 folders). This transfer took a fraction under 2 mins:

Synology & QNAP NAS Testing with the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive

Now, before I move on to the NAS testing. It is worth highlighting a couple of important factors with regard to the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB and the support available from each NAS brand I am focusing on for the testing. Now, Synology is the ONLY NAS brand in the market that also has its own first-party HDDs available to users too. These are Originally Toshiba Enterprise-grade produced hard disks that have had a Synology-specific firmware applied to them. Now, why is this relevant? Well, because some larger-scale Synology products in 2022 onwards do not list other 3rd Party HDDs as compatible. Even then, if you look up some of the older 2020 released NAS drives currently in the market (such as the DS920+ for example), they DO list HDDs from the likes of Western Digital (and their WD Red, Ultrastar and Gold series) BUT they do not list drives larger than 16TB at the time of writing. This is an odd stance by the brand, when larger-scale 18TB and 20TB hard drives are available in the market and designed for NAS.

If you install an HDD or SSD inside a Synology system with the latest version of their software platform DSM, but the HDD in question is not on the compatibility list, you are greeted by a message that will detail that the drive is not recommended in the storage manager. You can still use the HDD for Storage Pools, Volumes, Hot-spares, etc, but it is an oddly jarring message for some.

Of course, this is the current compatibility of this HDD at the time of writing and may well change in the future as further HDD capacities arrive and additional compatibility testing takes place.

Nevertheless, you can still push through this warning and proceed to testing the performance of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB HDD from within the Synology Storage Manager. Here was the results.

The HDD compatibility of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard drive on the QNAP NAS platform is less complicated (eg the 18TB HDDs from most brands are listed) but at the time of writing the 20TB models are still not on the available list of compatible HDDs (again, this will likely be addressed shortly after commercial launch). Here is how the drive is benchmarked and appeared in the QNAP NAS system.

Noise Testing the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB NAS Hard Drive

Another factor that is all too often overlooked is the noise that is generated by pro and enterprise-class hard drives. Because these larger capacity and more durable drives are built to provide as high a performance as possible, as well as survive the rigours of more industrial deployment, they end up being noticeably noisier in use. Now, in larger rackmount installations, the noise of the NAS system fans and operation will easily drown out the noise of HDDs. However, these things are much, much different in smaller-scale deployment. Now that most HDD brands have shifted their portfolios to only include 14/16TB media and higher to only exist in their Pro/Enterprise class tiers, those buying more modest NAS systems in the 1-8-Bay scale will be much more likely to hear the noise of these more enduring HDDs. The WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB is not an especially quiet drive when in operation and it has been designed with SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER server systems in mind. Therefore, even in idle, it makes a fair amount of noise when in operation. Here is how the drive sounds when the drive is powered on and on idle/standby (i.e no active file processes):

WD 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – IDLE (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

And here is how the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB sounds when the HDD is being HEAVILY accessed. using a benchmarking tool and extensive random 4K IOPS in read/write testing. Note, the higher the frequency of files, the noisier it will be, as the actuator inside will be working considerably hardware to allocate the small size/high frequency of data to the platters):

WD 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – HEAVY ACCESS (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

Once again, if you are deploying this in a larger than 8-Bay NAS system (especially rackmount, but desktop too), then the clicks, hums and whirs of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB will not be especially noticeable above the general active fan noise of the host NAS system. But in smaller deployments and especially in setups where you will be in closer proximity with the NAS, this HDD will be especially noticeable and larger RAID NAS arrays will exacerbate the noise.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Conclusion

The Western Digital DC HC560 does exactly what it sets out to achieve. This is an incredibly robust hard drive that you can tell WD has poured alot of that enterprise audience R&D into! The fact that it is 20TB is always going to be impressive, but the real draw here is that this high degree of storage capacity has been achieved, without SMR and without compromising it’s performance and use in a larger RAID environment. HDDs are still in popular industry use and until the ongoing demand for Large Affordable Capacity AND fast access continues, you can see why most popular hard drive brands are predicted to comfortably hit 50TB by the end of the decade. The Western Digital DC HC560 20TB hard disk is a great piece of engineering that continues to support the continued popularity of the Ultrastar series for large-scale data center use. However, it is REALLY important to understand WHY this drive is DC/Data-Center classed and not appropriate for the average home user looking to get big capacity in a single drive. For a start, the Western Digital DC HC560 is a noisy drive! Alongside a higher power consumption to keep this industrial drive running 24×7, it is a drive designed for exceptional fast power on/spin up, as well as having a nine spinning platters to dance between all the time, so it makes alot of humming, spinning, vibrating and clicking noises throughout it’s operations – in a data center, fulling populating a 24 bay rackmount, you won’t hear it. But in a modest home 2-4-Bay system, it sounds horrendous! Enterprise drives like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are designed for larger scale deployment and used in bulk (RAID configs), hence the lower price often when compared again NAS PRO drives like WD Red Pro. The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar is an exceptional Hyper-Scale storage hard drive, just don’t try to use it outside of those environments!

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The speed at which Hard Drive technology has evolved has been pretty crazy. Not so long ago, many highly respected journals and tech sites were signing the death warrant of Hard drives, largely down to the growing affordability of SSDs, NAND storage capacity and durability increasing and all the while HDDs plodding along with only relatively small improvements in their performance and cost. However, fast forward to 2022 and not only are HDDs still a ‘thing’ but, they continue to flourish! Why is this? Well, simply that the amount of data we as individuals and/or businesses is constantly increasing in volume, but so does the expected speed at which we demand access to it. SSDs give you great speed, but still cannot affordably match the price point per TB or even Petabyte of HDDs and in this world, a drive like the Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC560 20TB hard drive is going to be perfect. Designed with large-scale data center deployment in mind, the HC560 is a monster of a hard disk that includes a large number of innovations by WD to improve stability, performance, access times and workloads compared with regular desktop or NAS class HDDs. So, today I want to discuss the new Western Digital DC HC560 20TB, what makes it different to a Pro class drive, who it is designed for, who it ISN’T designed for and ultimately help you decide if it deserves your data. Let’s go.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Quick Conclusion

The Western Digital DC HC560 does exactly what it sets out to achieve. This is an incredibly robust hard drive that you can tell WD has poured alot of that enterprise audience R&D into! The fact that it is 20TB is always going to be impressive, but the real draw here is that this high degree of storage capacity has been achieved, without SMR and without compromising it’s performance and use in a larger RAID environment. HDDs are still in popular industry use and until the ongoing demand for Large Affordable Capacity AND fast access continues, you can see why most popular hard drive brands are predicted to comfortably hit 50TB by the end of the decade. The Western Digital DC HC560 20TB hard disk is a great piece of engineering that continues to support the continued popularity of the Ultrastar series for large-scale data center use. However, it is REALLY important to understand WHY this drive is DC/Data-Center classed and not appropriate for the average home user looking to get big capacity in a single drive. For a start, the Western Digital DC HC560 is a noisy drive! Alongside a higher power consumption to keep this industrial drive running 24×7, it is a drive designed for exceptional fast power on/spin up, as well as having a nine spinning platters to dance between all the time, so it makes alot of humming, spinning, vibrating and clicking noises throughout it’s operations – in a data center, fulling populating a 24 bay rackmount, you won’t hear it. But in a modest home 2-4-Bay system, it sounds horrendous! Enterprise drives like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are designed for larger scale deployment and used in bulk (RAID configs), hence the lower price often when compared again NAS PRO drives like WD Red Pro. The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar is an exceptional Hyper-Scale storage hard drive, just don’t try to use it outside of those environments!

BUILD - 10/10

HARDWARE - 10/10

PERFORMANCE - 9/10

PRICE - 9/10

VALUE - 9/10

9.4

PROS

20TB for under £400 (i.e £20 per Terabyte, when the general market cost if £25-30) is an absolute solid WIN
Extremely well-constructed design
7200 + 512MB Cache + OptiNAND = Great hardware base to work with
Sustained performance in testing stayed above 250MB/s over extended periods
550TB Annual Workload and 2.5 Million hr MTBF (even if you aren\'t impressed by the latter scale in 2022) is huge;y impressive
Considerably more available to buy online that you would expect, considering its a Data Center HDD

CONS

Noisy!
Higher typical Power Use
1x 20TB drive, when you factor RAID = A larger, long-term financial commitment to backups/redundancy (often overlooked)

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WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Specifications

The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar 20TB hard drive is, unsurprisingly, not a drive that is built like the rest. Aside from the hefty task of storing 20TB of data, this is a drive that is designed for deployment in much more industrial arrays, in near limitless storage pools (rackmount, bolted onto rackmount, etc, etc) and will be in operation 24×7, with regular access and a higher % of data recycling as data moves between hot>warm>cold storage systems. This combined with the need for the drive to maintain a sustainable performance (not just hit a high peak transfer rate, but be able to maintain it without over-saturation over long, long periods of time. Then there is the expectations of lifespan on a HDD like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB, with the industry standard of 5 years really being a great deal more significantly when it comes to data center hardware.

Therefore, the hardware specifications of the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are similar to those found in the WD Red Pro 20TB drive released around the same time, however, there is a greater focus on annual workloads, durability and lifespan of the drive when in constant use. With most regular/normal server class drives arriving with a 180TB write workload per year, Pro series drive support upto 300TB and Western Digital DC HC560 series a whopping 550TB annually – hence the much longer MTBF hour rating of 2.5 million. This combined with fixed 7200RPM and massive 512MB cache means that this is a drive that will run faster, even under sustained high use and do so in significantly larger RAID configurations. This does also result in a higher power consumption in use, standby or idle modes, as well as a larger general vibration when in use and a higher noise level when the drive is in operation (which climbs even higher during larger frequency but low size/volume access periods – ie those larger IOPS measurement based operations). Then there is the inclusion of OptiNAND from WD on these larger 18TB and 20TB HDDs, which we will touch on in a moment. Before then though, here are the full specifications of the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB HDD:

What is OptiNAND and Why is it so Important?

Of course, users who have been following the developments of WD in their roadmaps and reveals of larger-scale drive media will be aware that the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB also features a new technological design being rolled out in these bigger drives to merge existing storage technologies into something even better – OptiNAND. This is a new approach to an old idea that never really took off, where the benefits of small areas of faster NAND storage (more typically associated with SSD media) and affords a small area of NAND to a larger scale hard drive to be used for metadata and for storing data in the event of power failure. Flash is also interesting from a persistence standpoint. DRAM gets flushed on power loss, but NAND is non-volatile and can continue to keep metadata information without having to re-hydrate after a boot sequence, be removed from the system for some reason, or any other event where power drops. The WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB hard drive (much like other Western Digital 20TB drives currently) arrives with a portion of 64-layer/64GB BICS3 (3D TLC)

WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.

The slice of iNAND has its own dedicated controller, much like an SSD. While metadata management itself doesn’t help to increase platter density, it enables a range of benefits that do. As one can imagine, the higher the density of the HDD, the more metadata it generates. Moving metadata to a fast, dense and scalable storage area gives more freedom for manufacturers to create higher capacity drives.

OptiNAND	DRAM

But why choose NAND over DRAM? Western Digital explained back in August 2021 that modern high-density HDDs generate gigabytes of metadata and it’s too costly to include sufficient  DRAM to hold it. In addition, moving metadata to their own dedicated area will free up more space on the platters themselves to store user data. There’s more to it than capacity increases, though; using OptiNAND also helps with reliability, specifically with the repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI).

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Design

The design of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard drive is quite uniform when compared to the 16TB and 18TB versions of the same drive. The green PCB seemed the tiniest pinch thinner and less pronounced in this drive – likely due to every single millimetre counting in efforts to ensure that the drive is still a standard sized 3.5″ class HDD. Indeed, the newest generation of hard drives (i.e ones that use larger numbers of platters and helium sealing) tend to be considerably more solid and industrial in appearance than ever.

The top of the DC HC560 has the usual branded logos, technical details, firmware identification and date of production. The 20TB entries into the highly industry-favoured WD Ultrastar DC media range have arrived remarkably quickly with this drive being produced less than two months before the writing of this review. For a while, WD was noticeably slower on rolling out larger capacities since the 12TB and 14TB drive era, but in the last couple of storage tiers they have caught up considerably with their release frequency.

The sides of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any SAN/NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 269MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Ultrastar HC560) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens. It is also worth highlighting that (much like the rest of the Ultrastar range) the DC 560 20TB is available in SAS too, as well as arriving in a few different encryption standards inside (SED – self-encrypted drive) for industries that need secure read/write and secure erasure as standard).

The bulk of that area is occupied by those nine platters that are being read by a triple-stage actuator (an advancement on the standard arm that engages with the platters to retrieve data). This TSA means that errors and performance issues that can be associated with disks built on denser drive platters are hugely negated. Whether you are looking at NAS drives, SAN/Data-Center drives or even regular single deployment domestic hard drives, the bigger the drive in capacity, the more susceptible a drive can be to even the smallest vibration or shock passing through it from the host system. How does the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB counter this?

The 0F38755 20TB (much like the rest of the WD Gold and WD Ultrastar DC ranges in the larger capacities) hugely benefits from the multi-axis shocker sensor and 3D active balance plus in the framework and firmware of the HDD, which means the drive’s heads and platters have their generated vibration and ambient shock/vibration from the larger 24×7 server RAID configuration monitored and the drive proactively balances its performance. In short, this means that the drive can be more dynamic internally as surrounding system stress changes. Overall, what you have here is a very, VERY sturdy HDD. So, let’s see how that build quality translates into performance.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Testing

Testing the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB is going to be performed across multiple methods, but still rather unconventional. This drive is designed for deployment in data center server environments of 12-24-36-48bays and higher. So, although I have several NAS in the studio that could accommodate frequencies of up to 12 bays of drives, I do not have multiple WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB units. Therefore the testing I have conducted are all examples of single-drive performance. These will include several PC testing sessions using popular and recommended storage testing applications and two NAS tests involving Synology and QNAP.

• Windows 10 Pro Desktop System
• Intel i5 11400 Rocket Lake – 6-Core 2.6/4.4Ghz
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory
• Intel B560M mATX Motherboard
• OS Storage, Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD
• Test Hard Drive connected to a Sabrent USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gb/s external dock
• Synology test was conducted on a DS920+ NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool (selected so we can isolate the sound level)
• QNAP test was conducted on a TS-464 NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool (once again, to isolate the Ultrastar DC HC560 Noise level from the larger NAS system)

These last tests are important as not only is the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB HDD designed for NAS use, but also at the time of writing neither brand lists this hard drive as compatible. There is more to this though that I will touch on later.

The first test involved using AJA. This test was using a 1GB and 256MB test file (one test using a 1080p format and another being a massive 4K media file test). Unlike previous tests of SSDs here on NASCompares, a 16GB fileover a SATA HDD will take quite a while and although it would be interesting to see how the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB drive performs with this sustained largely sequential operation, I left heavy operations to later in the test routines.

Next, I performed a quick test on CrystalDiskMark using a 64MB and 512MB test file, as well as mixed 70/30% R/W. The results were consistent and lived upto WD’s claims here.

The next test was using ATTO disk benchmark and this one was using a 1GB and 256MB test file in the same windows PC test environment. However, this test was focused more on the IOPS. The random 4K operations of a hard drive will typically be hugely dwarfed by those of HDDs, but enterprise HDDs and pro series drives still tend to rate noticeably higher than domestic HDD and standard class NAS HDDs on this score. It is also worth highlighting that the 4K Random IOPS tests hugely demonstrated the noise level that this system can hit – which we will touch on later.

Finally, I conducted a straightforward transfer onto the HDD using Windows File Explorer. This was done with a folder filled with a little over 20GB of mixed file types and volumes (2,250 files across 71 folders). This transfer took a fraction under 2 mins:

Synology & QNAP NAS Testing with the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive

Now, before I move on to the NAS testing. It is worth highlighting a couple of important factors with regard to the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB and the support available from each NAS brand I am focusing on for the testing. Now, Synology is the ONLY NAS brand in the market that also has its own first-party HDDs available to users too. These are Originally Toshiba Enterprise-grade produced hard disks that have had a Synology-specific firmware applied to them. Now, why is this relevant? Well, because some larger-scale Synology products in 2022 onwards do not list other 3rd Party HDDs as compatible. Even then, if you look up some of the older 2020 released NAS drives currently in the market (such as the DS920+ for example), they DO list HDDs from the likes of Western Digital (and their WD Red, Ultrastar and Gold series) BUT they do not list drives larger than 16TB at the time of writing. This is an odd stance by the brand, when larger-scale 18TB and 20TB hard drives are available in the market and designed for NAS.

If you install an HDD or SSD inside a Synology system with the latest version of their software platform DSM, but the HDD in question is not on the compatibility list, you are greeted by a message that will detail that the drive is not recommended in the storage manager. You can still use the HDD for Storage Pools, Volumes, Hot-spares, etc, but it is an oddly jarring message for some.

Of course, this is the current compatibility of this HDD at the time of writing and may well change in the future as further HDD capacities arrive and additional compatibility testing takes place.

Nevertheless, you can still push through this warning and proceed to testing the performance of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB HDD from within the Synology Storage Manager. Here was the results.

The HDD compatibility of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard drive on the QNAP NAS platform is less complicated (eg the 18TB HDDs from most brands are listed) but at the time of writing the 20TB models are still not on the available list of compatible HDDs (again, this will likely be addressed shortly after commercial launch). Here is how the drive is benchmarked and appeared in the QNAP NAS system.

Noise Testing the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB NAS Hard Drive

Another factor that is all too often overlooked is the noise that is generated by pro and enterprise-class hard drives. Because these larger capacity and more durable drives are built to provide as high a performance as possible, as well as survive the rigours of more industrial deployment, they end up being noticeably noisier in use. Now, in larger rackmount installations, the noise of the NAS system fans and operation will easily drown out the noise of HDDs. However, these things are much, much different in smaller-scale deployment. Now that most HDD brands have shifted their portfolios to only include 14/16TB media and higher to only exist in their Pro/Enterprise class tiers, those buying more modest NAS systems in the 1-8-Bay scale will be much more likely to hear the noise of these more enduring HDDs. The WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB is not an especially quiet drive when in operation and it has been designed with SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER server systems in mind. Therefore, even in idle, it makes a fair amount of noise when in operation. Here is how the drive sounds when the drive is powered on and on idle/standby (i.e no active file processes):

WD 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – IDLE (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

And here is how the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB sounds when the HDD is being HEAVILY accessed. using a benchmarking tool and extensive random 4K IOPS in read/write testing. Note, the higher the frequency of files, the noisier it will be, as the actuator inside will be working considerably hardware to allocate the small size/high frequency of data to the platters):

WD 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – HEAVY ACCESS (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

Once again, if you are deploying this in a larger than 8-Bay NAS system (especially rackmount, but desktop too), then the clicks, hums and whirs of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB will not be especially noticeable above the general active fan noise of the host NAS system. But in smaller deployments and especially in setups where you will be in closer proximity with the NAS, this HDD will be especially noticeable and larger RAID NAS arrays will exacerbate the noise.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Conclusion

The Western Digital DC HC560 does exactly what it sets out to achieve. This is an incredibly robust hard drive that you can tell WD has poured alot of that enterprise audience R&D into! The fact that it is 20TB is always going to be impressive, but the real draw here is that this high degree of storage capacity has been achieved, without SMR and without compromising it’s performance and use in a larger RAID environment. HDDs are still in popular industry use and until the ongoing demand for Large Affordable Capacity AND fast access continues, you can see why most popular hard drive brands are predicted to comfortably hit 50TB by the end of the decade. The Western Digital DC HC560 20TB hard disk is a great piece of engineering that continues to support the continued popularity of the Ultrastar series for large-scale data center use. However, it is REALLY important to understand WHY this drive is DC/Data-Center classed and not appropriate for the average home user looking to get big capacity in a single drive. For a start, the Western Digital DC HC560 is a noisy drive! Alongside a higher power consumption to keep this industrial drive running 24×7, it is a drive designed for exceptional fast power on/spin up, as well as having a nine spinning platters to dance between all the time, so it makes alot of humming, spinning, vibrating and clicking noises throughout it’s operations – in a data center, fulling populating a 24 bay rackmount, you won’t hear it. But in a modest home 2-4-Bay system, it sounds horrendous! Enterprise drives like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are designed for larger scale deployment and used in bulk (RAID configs), hence the lower price often when compared again NAS PRO drives like WD Red Pro. The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar is an exceptional Hyper-Scale storage hard drive, just don’t try to use it outside of those environments!

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Remember when everyone said that hard drives would be dead by 2020? Yes, to say that statement has been debunked so incredibly thoroughly that it seems a bit comical to think that HDDs were going to go away any time soon. Yes, SSDs still continue to become more affordable AND faster with each generation (PCIe Gen 5 clocking in at 12/13GB/s), but HDDs will ALWAYS have the advantage of just sheer capacity and value for money – with the new WD Red Pro 22TB hard drive being a prime example of of why this storage medium continues to thrive. Arriving at a steep £609/$690 price tag, still manages to maintain the same level of price per TB of its’ smaller capacity alternatives in the portfolio – but with a staggering 22 Terabytes of capacity available, spread over 10 2.2TB platters and benefiting from on board to improve internal operations and space conservation. It even arrives in CMR/PMR format, so concerns of these larger drives only arriving in SMR design are out the window too. The 22TB is a big deal in many different ways and if you are in the market to buy a new server and want to prioritize storage capacity, this drive has the potential to turn a 2-Bay into a 44TB cupboard beast, a 4-Bay into an 88TB Monster and an 8-Bay into a potential 176TB behemoth! Of course, drives like the WD Red Pro series are designed for even bigger system deployment (upto 24 Bays in fact – which would cross half a Petabyte of storage) and you should always factor in your RAID/Redundancy, but right now this is the biggest commercially available HDD for NAS in the market and in terms of futureproofing your archive or your warm data storage – this drive is tremendously compelling! Today, I review the WD Rd Pro 22TB NAS drive, run our PC benchmarks, check compatibility with Synology & QNAP NAS systems and benchmark the drive there too.

WD Red Pro 22TB Hard Drive Review – Quick Conclusion

Whichever way you look at it, the WD Red Pro 22TB Hard drive is a stone-cold WINNER of a drive – both in terms of what it brings to the end user AND what this new 10-platter/OptiNAND drive design means for the future of the WD drive line up. WD does not over promise with this drive (with performance exceeding the brands reported benchmarks in almost every one of my tests, even using mid-range equipment) and they even nailed the price point in line with previous drives in the portfolio (though there is simply no avoiding that you are going to need deep pockets to fully populate any system with these 22TB drives). That said, much like any other WD Red Pro drive, the more industrial architecture still leads to a slightly higher running temp, noisier operation and slight increased power use. This is to be expected, but with no non-Pro alternative available at this capacity, the feasibility of fully populating a smaller scale system with the WD Red Pro 22TB is going to be both expensive AND noisy. I definitely recommend this drive to larger-scale NAS and SAN environments that need sustained RAID performance, high capacity and storage reliability – just maybe buy some earplugs if you plan on working in the same room as them.

BUILD - 10/10

HARDWARE - 10/10

PERFORMANCE - 10/10

PRICE - 8/10

VALUE - 9/10

9.4

PROS

22TB in a single 3.5\" drive is insane, even for 2022
OptiNAND concept and execution present performance and power-loss benefits
NAS Server tailored HDDs are always a good thing for 24x7 deployment
Good, solid internal hardware architecture at 7200RPM and 512MB traditional cache buffer
Solid, if expected, 300TB workload rating
5yr warranty and good brand reputation for replacements & Support
The 22TB Drives are (very) gradually appearing on NAS Compatibility Lists

CONS

Even if you break it down to Price per TB, it IS a very expensive HDD
Not a quiet drive when in random active use
The sequential data transfer rating is a fraction lower than the 18TB Red Pro

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WD Red Pro 22TB Hard Drive Review – Specifications

The hardware architecture of the WD Red Pro 22TB NAS hard drive is a combination of everything that we have seen in previous revisions of this long-running drive media series, combined with a new method of drive and data metadata management. This drive errs away from the energy-assisted magnetic recording of the Ultrastar 22TB released earlier in 2022, instead managing to provide this herculean 20 terabytes of storage via traditional conventional magnetic recording. It does this with data being split across TEN 2.2TB platters internally, spinning 7200RPM and with 512MB of onboard cache for buffering. The Pro moniker in the model ID is based on portfolio separation in the WD Red series (featuring WD Red, WD Red Plus and WD Red Pro) with this new 22TB NAS HDD being heavily aimed at a larger scale business use. This architecture (along with the noise and vibration protection being handled by 3D Active Balance and geared with the NASWare 3.0 firmware) allows a 300TB per year workload rating, (data center class is 550TB), a 1 million hours MTBF rating and the brand including a 5-year warranty with the drive. Below is a greater breakdown of the WD Red Pro 22TB specifications:

What is OptiNAND and Why is it so Important?

Of course, users who have been following the developments of WD in their roadmaps and reveals of larger-scale drive media will be aware that the WD Red Pro 22TB also features a new technological design being rolled out in these bigger drives to merge existing storage technologies into something even better – OptiNAND. This is a new approach to an old idea that never really took off, where the benefits of small areas of faster NAND storage (more typically associated with SSD media) and affords a small area of NAND to a larger scale hard drive to be used for metadata and for storing data in the event of power failure. Flash is also interesting from a persistence standpoint. DRAM gets flushed on power loss, but NAND is non-volatile and can continue to keep metadata information without having to re-hydrate after a boot sequence, be removed from the system for some reason, or any other event where power drops. The WD Red Pro 22TB hard drive (much like other Western Digital 22TB drives currently) arrives with a portion of 64-layer/64GB BICS3 (3D TLC)

WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.

The slice of iNAND has its own dedicated controller, much like an SSD. While metadata management itself doesn’t help to increase platter density, it enables a range of benefits that do. As one can imagine, the higher the density of the HDD, the more metadata it generates. Moving metadata to a fast, dense and scalable storage area gives more freedom for manufacturers to create higher capacity drives.

OptiNAND	DRAM

But why choose NAND over DRAM? Western Digital explained back in August 2021 that modern high-density HDDs generate gigabytes of metadata and it’s too costly to include sufficient  DRAM to hold it. In addition, moving metadata to their own dedicated area will free up more space on the platters themselves to store user data. There’s more to it than capacity increases, though; using OptiNAND also helps with reliability, specifically with the repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI).

WD Red Pro 22TB Hard Drive Review – Design

The design of the WD Red Pro 22TB Hard drive is quite uniform when compared to the 16TB, 18TB and 20TB versions of the same drive. The green PCB seemed the tiniest pinch thinner and less pronounced in this drive – likely due to every single millimetre counting in efforts to ensure that the drive is still a standard sized 3.5″ class HDD. Indeed, the newest generation of hard drives (i.e ones that use larger numbers of platters and helium sealing) tend to be considerably more solid and industrial in appearance than ever.

The top of the WD Red Pro has the usual branded logos, technical details, firmware identification and date of production. The 22TB entries into the popular WD Red NAS media range have arrived remarkably quickly with this drive being produced less than two months before the writing of this review. For a while, WD was noticeably slower on rolling out larger capacities since the 12TB and 14TB drive era, but in the last couple of storage tiers they have caught up considerably with their release frequency.

The sides of the WD Red Pro 22TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 265MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Red Pro) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens.

The bulk of that area is occupied by those ten platters that are being read by a triple-stage actuator (an advancement on the standard arm that engages with the platters to retrieve data). This TSA means that errors and performance issues that can be associated with disks built on denser drive platters are hugely negated. Whether you are looking at NAS drives, SAN/Data-Center drives or even regular single deployment domestic hard drives, the bigger the drive in capacity, the more susceptible a drive can be to even the smallest vibration or shock passing through it from the host system. How does the WD Red Pro 22TB counter this?

The WD221KFGX 22TB (much like the rest of the WD Red and WD Red Pro series in the larger capacities) hugely benefits from the multi-axis shocker sensor and 3D active balance plus in the framework and firmware of the HDD, which means the drive’s heads and platters have their generated vibration and ambient shock/vibration from the larger NAS RAID configuration monitored and the drive proactively balances its performance. In short, this means that the drive can be more dynamic internally as surrounding system stress changes. Overall, what you have here is a very, VERY sturdy HDD. So, let’s see how that build quality translates into performance.

WD Red Pro 22TB Hard Drive Review – Testing

Testing the WD Red Pro 22TB is going to be performed across multiple methods, but still rather unconventional. This drive is designed for deployment in 8+ Bay servers and higher and although I have several NAS in the studio that could accommodate this frequency of drives, I do not have multiple WD Red Pro 22TB units. Therefore the testing I have conducted are all examples of single-drive performance. These will include several PC testing sessions using popular and recommended storage testing applications and two NAS tests involving Synology and QNAP.

• Windows 10 Pro Desktop System
• Intel i5 11400 Rocket Lake – 6-Core 2.6/4.4Ghz
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory
• Intel B560M mATX Motherboard
• OS Storage, Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD
• Test Hard Drive connected to a Sabrent USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gb/s external dock
• Synology test was conducted on a DS920+ and DS2422+ NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool
• QNAP test was conducted on a TS-464 NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool

These last tests are important as not only is the WD Red Pro 22TB HDD designed for NAS use, but also at the time of writing neither brand lists this hard drive as compatible. There is more to this though that I will touch on later.

The first test involved using AJA. This test was using a 1GB test file (one test using a 1080p format and another being a massive 5K media file test). Unlike previous tests of SSDs here on NASCompares, a 16GB file over a SATA HDD will take quite a while and although it would be interesting to see how the WD Red Pro 22TB drive performs with this sustained largely sequential operation, I left heavy operations to later in the test routines.

Next, I performed a quick test on CrystalDiskMark using a 1GB test file, as well as mixed 70/30% R/W. The results were consistent and lived upto WD’s claims here.

The next test was using ATTO disk benchmark and this one was using a 1GB and 4GB test file in the same windows PC test environment. However, this test was focused more on the IOPS. The random 4K operations of a hard drive will typically be hugely dwarfed by those of HDDs, but enterprise HDDs and pro series drives still tend to rate noticeably higher than domestic HDD and standard class NAS HDDs on this score.

Finally, I conducted a straightforward transfer onto the HDD using Windows File Explorer. This was done with a folder filled with a little over 22.8GB of mixed file types and volumes (2,282 files across 72 folders). This transfer took a fraction over 2 mins 20 secs (5 sec margin of error):

Synology & QNAP NAS Testing with the WD Red Pro 22TB Hard Drive

Now, before I move on to the NAS testing. It is worth highlighting a couple of important factors with regard to the WD Red Pro 22TB and the support available from each NAS brand I am focusing on for the testing. Now, Synology is the ONLY NAS brand in the market that also has its own first-party HDDs available to users too. These are Originally Toshiba Enterprise-grade produced hard disks that have had a Synology-specific firmware applied to them. Now, why is this relevant? Well, because some larger-scale Synology products in 2022 onwards do not list other 3rd Party HDDs as compatible. Even then, if you look up some of the older 2020 released NAS drives currently in the market (such as the DS920+ for example), they DO list HDDs from the likes of Western Digital (and their WD Red, Ultrastar and Gold series) BUT they do not list drives larger than 18TB at the time of writing. This is an odd stance by the brand, when larger-scale 20TB and 22TB hard drives are available in the market and designed for NAS.

If you install an HDD or SSD inside a Synology system with the latest version of their software platform DSM, but the HDD in question is not on the compatibility list, you are greeted by a message that will detail that the drive is not recommended in the storage manager.

You can still use the HDD for Storage Pools, Volumes, Hot-spares, etc, but it is an oddly jarring message for some. Of course, this is the current compatibility of this HDD at the time of writing and may well change in the future as further HDD capacities arrive and additional compatibility testing takes place.

Nevertheless, you can still push through this warning and proceed to testing the performance of the WD Red Pro 22TB HDD from within the Synology Storage Manager. Here was the results.

The HDD compatibility of the WD Red Pro 22TB Hard drive on the QNAP NAS platform is less complicated (eg the 18TB HDDs from most brands are listed) but at the time of writing the 22TB models are still not on the available list of compatible HDDs (again, this will likely be addressed shortly after commercial launch). Here is how the drive is benchmarked and appeared in the QNAP NAS system.

Noise Testing the WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drive

Another factor that is all too often overlooked is the noise that is generated by pro and enterprise-class hard drives. Because these larger capacity and more durable drives are built to provide as high a performance as possible, as well as survive the rigours of more industrial deployment, they end up being noticeably noisier in use. Now, in larger rackmount installations, the noise of the NAS system fans and operation will easily drown out the noise of HDDs. However, these things are much, much different in smaller-scale deployment. Now that most HDD brands have shifted their portfolios to only include 14/16TB media and higher to only exist in their Pro/Enterprise class tiers, those buying more modest NAS systems in the 1-8-Bay scale will be much more likely to hear the noise of these more enduring HDDs. The WD Red Pro 22TB is not an especially quiet drive when in operation, even in idle. Here is how the drive sounds when the drive is powered on and on idle/standby (i.e no active file processes):

WD Red Pro 22TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – IDLE (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

And here is how the WD Red Pro 22TB sounds when the HDD is being HEAVILY accessed. using a benchmarking tool and extensive random 4K IOPS in read/write testing. Note, the higher the frequency of files, the noisier it will be, as the actuator inside will be working considerably hardware to allocate the small size/high frequency of data to the platters):

WD Red Pro 22TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – HEAVY ACCESS (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

Once again, if you are deploying this in a larger than 8-Bay NAS system (especially rackmount, but desktop too), then the clicks, hums and whirs of the WD Red Pro 22TB will not be especially noticeable above the general active fan noise of the host NAS system. But in smaller deployments and especially in setups where you will be in closer proximity with the NAS, this HDD will be especially noticeable and larger RAID NAS arrays will exacerbate the noise.

WD Red Pro 22TB Hard Drive Review – Conclusion

Whichever way you look at it, the WD Red Pro 22TB Hard drive is a stone-cold WINNER of a drive – both in terms of what it brings to the end user AND what this new 10-platter/OptiNAND drive design means for the future of the WD drive line up. WD does not over promise with this drive (with performance exceeding the brands reported benchmarks in almost every one of my tests, even using mid-range equipment) and they even nailed the price point in line with previous drives in the portfolio (though there is simply no avoiding that you are going to need deep pockets to fully populate any system with these 22TB drives). That said, much like any other WD Red Pro drive, the more industrial architecture still leads to a slightly higher running temp, noisier operation and slight increased power use. This is to be expected, but with no non-Pro alternative available at this capacity, the feasibility of fully populating a smaller scale system with the WD Red Pro 22TB is going to be both expensive AND noisy. I definitely recommend this drive to larger-scale NAS and SAN environments that need sustained RAID performance, high capacity and storage reliability – just maybe buy some earplugs if you plan on working in the same room as them.

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Finally, for free advice about your setup, just leave a message in the comments below here at NASCompares.com and we will get back to you. Need Help? Where possible (and where appropriate) please provide as much information about your requirements, as then I can arrange the best answer and solution to your needs. Do not worry about your e-mail address being required, it will NOT be used in a mailing list and will NOT be used in any way other than to respond to your enquiry. [contact-form-7] TRY CHAT Terms and Conditions

If you like this service, please consider supporting us. We use affiliate links on the blog allowing NAScompares information and advice service to be free of charge to you.Anything you purchase on the day you click on our links will generate a small commission which isused to run the website. Here is a link for Amazon and B&H.You can also get me a Ko-fi or old school Paypal. Thanks!To find out more about how to support this advice service check HEREIf you need to fix or configure a NAS, check Fiver Have you thought about helping others with your knowledge? Find Instructions Here  

 

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Alternatively, why not ask me on the ASK NASCompares forum, by clicking the button below. This is a community hub that serves as a place that I can answer your question, chew the fat, share new release information and even get corrections posted. I will always get around to answering ALL queries, but as a one-man operation, I cannot promise speed! So by sharing your query in the ASK NASCompares section below, you can get a better range of solutions and suggestions, alongside my own.

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Technology is moving FAST! Yet one of the most overlooked fast-moving areas of technology in the market is data storage! In the last decade we have seen data storage averages used by consumers and businesses hugely multiply in volume and frequency, with hardware providers rushing to meet this demand. Because storage scales have increased so rapidly and the limitations of ‘local’ data access have long since been abandoned in favour of remote sever and cloud services, the result is that brands like Synology (pretty much the no #1 Network Attached Storage provider in the world) and WD (arguably one of the biggest hard drive manufacturers in the world) have been producing high quality and high-performance solutions to support this. Today I want to talk about two of each respective brand’s business targetted 2022 releases, combine them and give you some idea of just want they can do! In this article, I will be taking the Synology DS1522+ Ryzen-powered NAS for a spin, alongside four of the new WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drives, in order to see the performance we can expect in a wide range of configurations. In today’s article I hope to identify the following:

• The impact of different RAID configurations (with their different parity and redundancy calculations) on performance
• Identifying the performance differences between small and large file volumes/frequency in overall throughput
• Measuring the improvements in the performance of the WD Red Pro 22TB HDDs as multiple are in a RAID (performance increase as multiple drives Read/Write simultaneously)
• Testing external throughput with both a 5GbE connection and 10GbE connection to identify the point of network saturation
• Finally, to see if the DS1522+ more streamlined architecture is enough to support and perform at peak with the WD Red Pro 22TB Hard Disks

Before we get started, if you are interested in emulating these tests for yourself, or are keen to achieve these results in your own setup and want to know the devices I used in these tests, you can use the links below to find each item on Amazon in your local region. Using these links will result in amazon sending a small % back to us here at NASCompares that goes directly back into our site and services, allowing us to continue making these articles, videos and more – Thanks in advance!

Note – If you would rather WATCH these tests in video form, you can watch the WD Red 22TB and Synology DS1522+ NAS Performance Tests here on the NASCompares YouTube Channel.

Synology DS1522+ & WD Red Pro 22TBs – The Test Setup and Hardware Used

These tests were conducted in a Windows 10 client machine environment over 3 days (factoring RAID rebuild times and cool downs). Although the DS1522+ NAS is a 5 bay NAS system, I was only able to secure four 22TB WD Red Pro HDDs, so that needs to be factored in. That said, the performance measurements of even 4 of these drives was still remarkably impressive for mechanical hard disks. The benchmark software used for these tests was Atto Disk Benchmark, as it provides a very wide range of test setups – as well as working much more smoothly with iSCSI targets/LUNs in windows and providing clearly information to display to the layman for this article. Lastly, I included a barrage of 5GbE network tests because, although current no Synology NAS hardware in the market features 5GbE network architecture, there is an increasing vogue for hardware client devices (PCs, Macs, etc) to have their network connections easily upgraded to 2.5G and 5G with USB adapters (for as little as £25) ensuring that a 10GbE connected NAS can be shared to a full extent with connected clients. Here is a breakdown of the specific test setup components:

• Synology DS1522+ 5-Bay NAS, E10G22-T1-mini 10GbE Adapter, DSM 7.1

• WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drives x4, RAID 0 or RAID 5 Configuration (depending on the test)

• 20TB iSCSI LUN via the Default iSCSI Manager Target, connected to the Windows PC with the iSCSI initiator as a local appearing drive for Atto Disk Benchmark

• Local PC Network Adapter USB-to-5GbE Adaper and a Thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter (depending on the test requirements)

• Windows 10 Pro PC, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.20 GHz, 32GB DDR4 2666Mhz Memory, Internal Samsung 970 Pro 1TB SSD

• MTU / Jumbo Frames set to 9K on both the NAS and the Network Adapter, Direct Connection (LAN-to-LAN), no network switch

Before we go further though, we need something to measure against. Here is the default performance of a SINGLE WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drive, using the Synology DSM Storage Manager Benchmark Tool:

As you can see, even on it’s own, a single WD Red Pro 22TB HDD can largely saturate even a single external 2.5GbE connection (though, most Synology arrive with 1GbE or 10Gbe). So, at the very least, you are going to get 240-260MB/s with just the one drive. So, let’s get down to business! I performed a wide scope of tests, so let’s go through those results!

Synology DS1522+ NAS, RAID 5, 5GbE Performance Tests

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 374MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 427MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 377MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 426MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 371MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 426MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 371MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 425MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 365MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 426MB/s

Synology DS1522+ NAS, RAID 0, 10GbE Performance Tests

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 856MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 841MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 847MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 864MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 851MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

Synology DS1522+ NAS, RAID 5, 10GbE Performance Tests

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 962MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 965MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 663MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 786MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 1.15GB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 720MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 993MB/s

QNAP TS-464 NAS + WD Red 22TB RAID 6 Tests – Verdict & Conclusion

Overall, I was tremendously impressed with both the WD Red Pro 22TB drives AND the Synology DS1522+ NAS in these tests. My big takeaways from these tests were:

• Despite the AMD Ryzen R1600 being a Dual Core Processor, it was easily able to handle even the heavy 16GB, RAID 5 performance tests with little system impact
• The four 22TB Red Pro Hard Drives were particularly impressive, given they were able to able to fully saturate the 10GbE connection at numerous points
• The drives and NAS in these tests tended to favour the Read performance, though Write performance was still great.

Of course, it is always worth remembering that these tests were based on synthetic scenarios that were generated by a benchmarking tool. So these do not necessarily translate directly into the results that you will get with my unregulated and general ad hoc use. However, there are still fantastic results for this NAS+HDD drive combo, especially at this more compact scale. If you want to watch these tests in video form, you can use the YouTube publication below:

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this helpful and that it really helped you to make the most of your storage. Want to help me continue to make more guides, reviews and tutorials on the subject of NAS? Then you can do so in a few different ways (any of which I will be eternally grateful for if you choose to!). You can visit the ‘Support NAS Passion’ page HERE and see a few different ways that you can help us keep the lights on. Alternatively, you can use one of the links below to shop for your hardware today or in future (visiting those sites via the link below ensures that we get a mall commission on absolutely anything you purchase – and doesn’t cost you anything extra). Finally, if you want to support us in spirit rather than financially, recommend our blog to a friend or professional colleague or share a link on your social media site of choice. Thank you for reading and have a fantastic week!

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When you buy a new NAS and drives, one of the most important long-term decisions that you will make is choosing your RAID level. A RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is the process of combining multiple media drives together into a single area of storage (a Storage Pool). Different RAID configurations provide different benefits and although it is not impossible to switch/change your RAID level years down the line it is not particularly straightforward, is quite limited in the range of RAID change options and often just makes you wish you had picked better the first time around! That is one of the main purposes of today’s article, to understand the performance differences between the big three RAID configurations that people choose for their first NAS system – RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 6. In order to achieve this, I have opted to use the 2022 released QNAP TS-464 4-Bay NAS, combined with a 10GbE upgrade and alongside this I have fully populated the device with FOUR of the new massive capacity 22TB WD Red Pro series Hard drives. What we have here is a fully-featured, Prosumer NAS system with an external 1,000MB/s external throughput and a potential 88 Terabytes to play with! This will be a great way to test the performance potential of RAID 0 vs RAID 5 vs RAID 6 for users who are considering a modest scale 4-Bay NAS and want to make sure they pick the right RAID configuration for their needs right – FIRST TIME! Before we get started, if you are interested in emulating these tests for yourself, or are keen to achieve these results in your own setup and want to know the devices I used in these tests, you can use the links below to find each item on Amazon in your local region. Using these links will result in amazon sending a small % back to us here at NASCompares that goes directly back into our site and services, allowing us to continue making these articles, videos and more – Thanks in advance!

Note – If you would rather WATCH these tests in video form, you can watch the WD Red 22TB and QNAP TS-464 NAS Performance Tests here on the NASCompares YouTube Channel. Alternatively, you can watch my review of either the QNAP TS-464 NAS or WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drive below:

QNAP TS-464 NAS & WD Red Pro 22TBs – The Test Setup and Hardware Used

These tests were conducted in a Windows 10 client machine environment over 3 days (factoring RAID rebuild times and cool downs) and all three RAID configurations (RAID 0, 5, 6) were conducted with four WD Red Pro series 22TB hard disks. The benchmark software used for these tests was Atto Disk Benchmark, as it provides a very wide range of test setups – as well as working much more smoothly with iSCSI targets/LUNs in windows and providing clearly information to display to the layman for this article. Additionally, given that just one of the WD 22TB hard drives can achieve more than 250MB/s throughput, I went ahead with a 10GbE, point-to-point connection between my PC and the NAS, using a QNAP 1st party 1 Port 10GbE card and the Sonnet Solo 10GbE Thunderbolt to 10GbE adapter. Here is a breakdown of the specific test setup components:

• QNAP TS-464 4-Bay NAS with QTS 5

• WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drives x4, RAID 0 or RAID 5 Configuration (depending
• 20TB iSCSI LUN via the Default iSCSI Manager Target, connected to the Windows PC with the iSCSI initiator as a local appearing drive for Atto Disk Benchmark

• Local PC Network Adapter using the Thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter

• Windows 10 Pro PC, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.20 GHz, 32GB DDR4 2666Mhz Memory, Internal Samsung 970 Pro 1TB SSD

• MTU / Jumbo Frames set to 9K on both the NAS and the Network Adapter, Direct Connection (LAN-to-LAN), no network switch

Before we go further though, we need something to measure against. Here is the default performance of a SINGLE WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drive, using the QNAP QTS Storage Manager Benchmark Tool:

As you can see, even on it’s own, a single WD Red Pro 22TB HDD can largely saturate even a single external 2.5GbE connection. So, at the very least, you are going to get 240-260MB/s with just the one drive. So, let’s get down to business! I performed a wide scope of tests, so let’s go through those results!

QNAP TS-464 NAS, RAID 0 10GbE Performance Tests

The first RAID we are testing in our WD Red Pro 22TB and QNAP TS-464 NAS setup is RAID 0. In a RAID 0 configuration, ALL of the available capacity of the drives you select is available BUT you have no redundancy (i.e no safety net if a drive fails) and in the event of one of your HDDs going bust, you almost certainly lose ALL of your data (this can be very marginally negated if you spend some time deciding on a spanning or stripe style RAID protocol). So, why do people choose RAID 0 if it has such a high cost in the event of drive failure? Well, there are the massive storage benefits of course, but there is the other big bonus that the NAS will be reading and writing ALL the drives at once, hugely increasing the maximum performance that can be achieved. Also, as RAID 0 has no redundancy and no CPU resources are being used to calculate parity (a blueprint of data that is used for data restoration) which further increases performance AND lowers overall system hardware use. Therefore I expect the performance of the WD Red Pro 22TB HDDs to be very good in a RAID 0 configuration over 10GbE.

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 803MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 837MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 803MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 835MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 814MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 835MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 806MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 730MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 803MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 805MB/s

QNAP TS-464 NAS, RAID 5 10GbE Performance Tests

Next, I wanted to test the most popular RAID configuration for 4-Bay NAS drives like the QNAP TS-464 – RAID 5. In this configuration, it pools the four 22TB WD Red Pro hard disks together, but thanks to a system of data being striped across the disks during writing (i.e. data is written across the disks in a 1, 2, 3, etc pattern continuously AND one disk on each stripe having parity data (a blueprint of the data written on the other disks in that particular stripe), it means that in the event of a drive dying, you can rebuild the data that was on the broken drive from the remaining data on the other disks and the availability parity data. This also means that in order to maintain a balance of combined storage and ensure space for parity data, a RAID 5 will result in 1 drive’s worth of data capacity being educated from the overall total. So, in the case of the TS-464 and four 22TB Hard Drives, you would get 66TB of available data (as 22TB of that is used for parity data provisioning). Additionally, although you are still reading AND writing from multiple disks at once, the calculation, creation and maintenance of parity data in a RAID 5 has a negative impact on the total performance, as the system is using more resources (CPU+Memory) in order to keep things running smoothly in your storage pool. Modern NAS systems have done an excellent job of choosing very capable CPUs and RAID 5 configurations in recent years have been substantially better in performance. However, a RAID 5 will still have a lower degree of performance to a comparable RAID 0 hardware setup. Here is how the RAID 5 on the WD Red Pro 22TBs and the QNAP TS-464 NAS performed:

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 800MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 779MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 517MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 781MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 535MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 781MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 520MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 687MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 525MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 724MB/s

QNAP TS-464 NAS, RAID 6 10GbE Performance Tests

Our final test of the QNAP TS-464 NAS was a configuration setup up of a RAID 6 on the four WD Red Pro 22TBs. Now, a RAID 6 is highly comparable to a RAID 5 (discussed above), but instead of 1 drive of failure protection (the redundancy/safety net), you have TWO drives of safety. You need at least four drives in order to setup a RAID 6, but most users who consider RAID 6 are using much, much larger bay configurations and you generally find RAID 6 in homes/businesses where the data on the drives is mission critical, priceless or utterly impossible to recreate (from company accounts to photos of your children growing up!). Now, alongside the expected drop in capacity being 2 drives lower (so in the case of this configuration of 4x 22TB HDDs, you have 44TB available to storage data), the system’s overhead in creating parity/blueprints of the current data in efforts to maintain that two disk redundancy/safety net is twice as much, so performance will decrease further. So, let’s see how the QNAP TS-464 and the WD Red Pro 22TBs faired in performance over 10GbE in a RAID 6 set up:

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 809MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 780MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 399MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 781MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 430MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 781MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 444MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 625MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 422MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 623MB/s

QNAP TS-464 NAS + WD Red 22TB RAID 6 Tests – Verdict & Conclusion

Overall, the performance that the QNAP TS-464 NAS and those 22TB WD Red Pro HDDs provided in each RAID configuration was pretty much what I would have expected. The Celeron CPU inside this NAS is a much more middle-of-the-road processor compared to more ‘file system’ and ‘general throughput-focused’ alternatives in the AMD-embedded Ryzen, Xeon or Atom that are found on other bulkier NAS systems, so it was always unlikely to saturate a full 10GbE connection with just four drives, even in a RAID 0 with an Intel Celeron processor. However, the RAID 5 configuration regularly hit the 600-700MB/s mark in this 4 disk RAID 5 configuration which, considering we are still talking about mechanical HDDs (even at 22TB and 265MB/s per drive) is pretty impressive! The RAID 6 performance clearly took the wind out of the sales of this 4-Bay though and unless you were using a larger 6-8 Bay configuration (such as the TS-664 or higher), this NAS hardware configuration struggled at the double parity level. Overall, the WD Red Pro 22TB hard drives perform exceptionally well and were consistent in their operation and the QNAP TS-464 NAS did exactly what it promised! If you are looking for a huge amount of capacity in a compact package, this potential 88TB 4-Bay desktop NAS combo is pretty incredible!

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This description contains links to Amazon. These links will take you to some of the products mentioned in today's content. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Visit the NASCompares Deal Finder to find the best place to buy this device in your region, based on Service, Support and Reputation - Just Search for your NAS Drive in the Box Below

Need Advice on Data Storage from an Expert?

TRY CHAT

If you like this service, please consider supporting us. We use affiliate links on the blog allowing NAScompares information and advice service to be free of charge to you.Anything you purchase on the day you click on our links will generate a small commission which isused to run the website. Here is a link for Amazon and B&H.You can also get me a Ko-fi or old school Paypal. Thanks!To find out more about how to support this advice service check HEREIf you need to fix or configure a NAS, check Fiver Have you thought about helping others with your knowledge? Find Instructions Here  

Or support us by using our affiliate links on Amazon UK and Amazon US

    

 

WE LOVE COFFEE

When you buy a new NAS and drives, one of the most important long-term decisions that you will make is choosing your RAID level. A RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is the process of combining multiple media drives together into a single area of storage (a Storage Pool). Different RAID configurations provide different benefits and although it is not impossible to switch/change your RAID level years down the line it is not particularly straightforward, is quite limited in the range of RAID change options and often just makes you wish you had picked better the first time around! That is one of the main purposes of today’s article, to understand the performance differences between the big three RAID configurations that people choose for their first NAS system – RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 6. In order to achieve this, I have opted to use the 2022 released QNAP TS-464 4-Bay NAS, combined with a 10GbE upgrade and alongside this I have fully populated the device with FOUR of the new massive capacity 22TB WD Red Pro series Hard drives. What we have here is a fully-featured, Prosumer NAS system with an external 1,000MB/s external throughput and a potential 88 Terabytes to play with! This will be a great way to test the performance potential of RAID 0 vs RAID 5 vs RAID 6 for users who are considering a modest scale 4-Bay NAS and want to make sure they pick the right RAID configuration for their needs right – FIRST TIME!

Before we get started, if you are interested in emulating these tests for yourself, or are keen to achieve these results in your own setup and want to know the devices I used in these tests, you can use the links below to find each item on Amazon in your local region. Using these links will result in amazon sending a small % back to us here at NASCompares that goes directly back into our site and services, allowing us to continue making these articles, videos and more – Thanks in advance!

Note – If you would rather WATCH these tests in video form, you can watch the WD Red 22TB and QNAP TS-464 NAS Performance Tests here on the NASCompares YouTube Channel. Alternatively, you can watch my review of either the QNAP TS-464 NAS or WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drive below:

QNAP TS-464 NAS & WD Red Pro 22TBs – The Test Setup and Hardware Used

These tests were conducted in a Windows 10 client machine environment over 3 days (factoring RAID rebuild times and cool downs) and all three RAID configurations (RAID 0, 5, 6) were conducted with four WD Red Pro series 22TB hard disks. The benchmark software used for these tests was Atto Disk Benchmark, as it provides a very wide range of test setups – as well as working much more smoothly with iSCSI targets/LUNs in windows and providing clearly information to display to the layman for this article. Additionally, given that just one of the WD 22TB hard drives can achieve more than 250MB/s throughput, I went ahead with a 10GbE, point-to-point connection between my PC and the NAS, using a QNAP 1st party 1 Port 10GbE card and the Sonnet Solo 10GbE Thunderbolt to 10GbE adapter. Here is a breakdown of the specific test setup components:

• QNAP TS-464 4-Bay NAS with QTS 5

• WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drives x4, RAID 0 or RAID 5 Configuration (depending
• 20TB iSCSI LUN via the Default iSCSI Manager Target, connected to the Windows PC with the iSCSI initiator as a local appearing drive for Atto Disk Benchmark

• Local PC Network Adapter using the Thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter

• Windows 10 Pro PC, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.20 GHz, 32GB DDR4 2666Mhz Memory, Internal Samsung 970 Pro 1TB SSD

• MTU / Jumbo Frames set to 9K on both the NAS and the Network Adapter, Direct Connection (LAN-to-LAN), no network switch

Before we go further though, we need something to measure against. Here is the default performance of a SINGLE WD Red Pro 22TB NAS Hard Drive, using the QNAP QTS Storage Manager Benchmark Tool:

As you can see, even on it’s own, a single WD Red Pro 22TB HDD can largely saturate even a single external 2.5GbE connection. So, at the very least, you are going to get 240-260MB/s with just the one drive. So, let’s get down to business! I performed a wide scope of tests, so let’s go through those results!

QNAP TS-464 NAS, RAID 0 10GbE Performance Tests

The first RAID we are testing in our WD Red Pro 22TB and QNAP TS-464 NAS setup is RAID 0. In a RAID 0 configuration, ALL of the available capacity of the drives you select is available BUT you have no redundancy (i.e no safety net if a drive fails) and in the event of one of your HDDs going bust, you almost certainly lose ALL of your data (this can be very marginally negated if you spend some time deciding on a spanning or stripe style RAID protocol). So, why do people choose RAID 0 if it has such a high cost in the event of drive failure? Well, there are the massive storage benefits of course, but there is the other big bonus that the NAS will be reading and writing ALL the drives at once, hugely increasing the maximum performance that can be achieved. Also, as RAID 0 has no redundancy and no CPU resources are being used to calculate parity (a blueprint of data that is used for data restoration) which further increases performance AND lowers overall system hardware use. Therefore I expect the performance of the WD Red Pro 22TB HDDs to be very good in a RAID 0 configuration over 10GbE.

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 803MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 837MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 803MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 835MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 814MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 835MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 806MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 730MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 803MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 805MB/s

QNAP TS-464 NAS, RAID 5 10GbE Performance Tests

Next, I wanted to test the most popular RAID configuration for 4-Bay NAS drives like the QNAP TS-464 – RAID 5. In this configuration, it pools the four 22TB WD Red Pro hard disks together, but thanks to a system of data being striped across the disks during writing (i.e. data is written across the disks in a 1, 2, 3, etc pattern continuously AND one disk on each stripe having parity data (a blueprint of the data written on the other disks in that particular stripe), it means that in the event of a drive dying, you can rebuild the data that was on the broken drive from the remaining data on the other disks and the availability parity data. This also means that in order to maintain a balance of combined storage and ensure space for parity data, a RAID 5 will result in 1 drive’s worth of data capacity being educated from the overall total. So, in the case of the TS-464 and four 22TB Hard Drives, you would get 66TB of available data (as 22TB of that is used for parity data provisioning). Additionally, although you are still reading AND writing from multiple disks at once, the calculation, creation and maintenance of parity data in a RAID 5 has a negative impact on the total performance, as the system is using more resources (CPU+Memory) in order to keep things running smoothly in your storage pool. Modern NAS systems have done an excellent job of choosing very capable CPUs and RAID 5 configurations in recent years have been substantially better in performance. However, a RAID 5 will still have a lower degree of performance to a comparable RAID 0 hardware setup. Here is how the RAID 5 on the WD Red Pro 22TBs and the QNAP TS-464 NAS performed:

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 800MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 779MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 517MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 781MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 535MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 781MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 520MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 687MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 525MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 724MB/s

QNAP TS-464 NAS, RAID 6 10GbE Performance Tests

Our final test of the QNAP TS-464 NAS was a configuration setup up of a RAID 6 on the four WD Red Pro 22TBs. Now, a RAID 6 is highly comparable to a RAID 5 (discussed above), but instead of 1 drive of failure protection (the redundancy/safety net), you have TWO drives of safety. You need at least four drives in order to setup a RAID 6, but most users who consider RAID 6 are using much, much larger bay configurations and you generally find RAID 6 in homes/businesses where the data on the drives is mission critical, priceless or utterly impossible to recreate (from company accounts to photos of your children growing up!). Now, alongside the expected drop in capacity being 2 drives lower (so in the case of this configuration of 4x 22TB HDDs, you have 44TB available to storage data), the system’s overhead in creating parity/blueprints of the current data in efforts to maintain that two disk redundancy/safety net is twice as much, so performance will decrease further. So, let’s see how the QNAP TS-464 and the WD Red Pro 22TBs faired in performance over 10GbE in a RAID 6 set up:

ATTO DiskBenchmark 64MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 809MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 780MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 399MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 781MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 1GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 430MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 781MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 444MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 625MB/s

ATTO DiskBenchmark 16GB File Test, 512B-to-64MB I/O Size

Peak Write Performance – 422MB/s  /  Peak Read Performance – 623MB/s

QNAP TS-464 NAS + WD Red 22TB RAID 6 Tests – Verdict & Conclusion

Overall, the performance that the QNAP TS-464 NAS and those 22TB WD Red Pro HDDs provided in each RAID configuration was pretty much what I would have expected. The Celeron CPU inside this NAS is a much more middle-of-the-road processor compared to more ‘file system’ and ‘general throughput-focused’ alternatives in the AMD-embedded Ryzen, Xeon or Atom that are found on other bulkier NAS systems, so it was always unlikely to saturate a full 10GbE connection with just four drives, even in a RAID 0 with an Intel Celeron processor. However, the RAID 5 configuration regularly hit the 600-700MB/s mark in this 4 disk RAID 5 configuration which, considering we are still talking about mechanical HDDs (even at 22TB and 265MB/s per drive) is pretty impressive! The RAID 6 performance clearly took the wind out of the sales of this 4-Bay though and unless you were using a larger 6-8 Bay configuration (such as the TS-664 or higher), this NAS hardware configuration struggled at the double parity level. Overall, the WD Red Pro 22TB hard drives perform exceptionally well and were consistent in their operation and the QNAP TS-464 NAS did exactly what it promised! If you are looking for a huge amount of capacity in a compact package, this potential 88TB 4-Bay desktop NAS combo is pretty incredible!

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If you like this service, please consider supporting us. We use affiliate links on the blog allowing NAScompares information and advice service to be free of charge to you.Anything you purchase on the day you click on our links will generate a small commission which isused to run the website. Here is a link for Amazon and B&H.You can also get me a Ko-fi or old school Paypal. Thanks!To find out more about how to support this advice service check HEREIf you need to fix or configure a NAS, check Fiver Have you thought about helping others with your knowledge? Find Instructions Here  

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That’s Right! WD has now officially released their 22TB series of HDDs to the WD Gold, WD Red Pro and WD Purple Pro series of hard disks. So, why is this such a big deal? Well, anyone who has been watching the development of hard drives over at Western Digital will have surely noticed a tremendous change in strategy by one of (if not THE) biggest brand in hard drives in the last couple of years. For a long time, WD had been a little more cautious in it’s releasing of larger capacities (especially compared with their biggest rival Seagate) and was rarely the first to commercially release the biggest capacities into the consumer and business market. However, the last 24 months have seen WD change this development/release method dramatically and we have seen them release a wide variety of extremely high capacity HDDs into their respect ranges (we only JUST reviewed their 20TB WD Red Pro on YouTube and Western Digital Ultrastar HC560 20TB HDDs here on NASCompares shortly after release). Add to this that these larger capacity HDDs are getting added to each of the brand’s highest-profile product ranges (as well as the 26TB Ultrastar UltraSMR drives being released now in July ’22) and we are seeing a very, VERY different WD to one we saw back in 2019/2020. So, let’s take a closer look at these three new 22TB Hard Drives, what they are designed for and what separates them from one another!

Hardware Specifications of the WD Red Pro, WD Purple and WD Gold 22TB Hard Drives

The first thing to note is that these three 22TB hard drives is that they are designed very similarity in terms of standard hardware architecture. They are all 7200 RPM (rotations per min) and data is spread across 10 internal platters that are comprised of 2.2TB per platter. Despite it’s remarkable capacity, the drive uses traditional CMR/PMR, but is improved upon with the use of energy-assisted magnetic recording too. These amply internal physical storage spacing in accompanied with a huge 512MB of on board cache to keep things moving and each drive also features a small flash module on board known as OptiNAND (we will go into more detail on that in a moment). All three 2TB Hard drives are available in SATA/6Gb (and SAS options available in other model IDs), but thanks to small differences in the gearing of each drive to be better suited to their end user, the WD Red Pro and WD Purple Pro have a maximum reported 265MB/s Sustained Sequential Read and the WD Gold has a much higher and possibly industry winning (for SATA in traditional platter-arm design) 291MB/s Performance, almost half way saturating SATA 6Gb/s. Herre is a breakdown of the specifications of each of the WD 22TB Hard Disks:

Branding
Drive Family	GOLD	RED PRO	PURPLE PRO / AI
Price	£639.99 /  $769 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE	£601.99 /  $729 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE	£539.99 /  $649 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE
Model ID	22	WD221KFGX	WD221PURP
Designed Use	Data-Center	Large Scale NAS	NAS Surveillance / NVR
RPM (Rotations per Minute)	7200RPM	7200RPM	7200RPM
Platter Density/Frequency	10 Platters (2.2TB each)	10 Platters (2.2TB each)	10 Platters (2.2TB each)
On-board Cache	512MB	512MB	512MB
Recording Method	EPMR	EPMR	EPMR
OptiNAND	Yes	Yes	Yes
Max Performance (aka Transfer	291	265	265
Workload Rating (TB per Year)	550	300	550
Load / Unload Cycle Rtaing	600K	600K	600K
Unrecoverable Read Errors	1 in 10E15	1 in 10E13	1 in 10E15
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure Hrs)	2.5M	1M	2.5M
Power Usage (Idle / Active) (W)	5.7 / 9.3	3.4 / 6.8	5.6 / 6.9
Manf Warranty	5	5	5

What is the Difference Between the 22TB WD Red Pro vs WD Gold vs WD Purple Pro HDD?

The WD Red Pro series of HDDs are designed for use in 24×7 NAS servers that are used in Medium-large businesses (recommended for any system in desktop or rackmount above 8 bays). The WD Gold series is designed for Enterprise, Data Center and/or Hyper-scale deployment, as they are geared towards a much faster spin up and spin down, whilst also ensuring high sustained speeds over time and can endure larger scales of write-delete-re-write throughout their lifespan (something very common in enterprise hot-warm-cold storage systems that use different media types at each tier). Finally, there is the WD Purple Por series, a range of drives specifically geared towards surveillance (cameras and data recording instruments generally) and although similar in deployment to the WD Red Pro series (ie small-medium-large business and above 8 bays of storage per system), the main difference is that WD Purple is significant;y geared more towards Write than read, as NVR/Surveillance-servers will spend 95%+ of there operations time WRITING data from recording cameras etc , whilst 5% or less will be spent retrieving/viewing those recordings.

The main difference between all three in terms of actual use is:

• The WD Purple 22TB is an HDD that will allow a tremendously sustainable Write Speed over time but not at the expense of durability, thanks to a high 2.5M MTBF and 550TB annual workload. Therefore ensuring that surveillance recordings are consistent and the drive will have sufficient robust hardware to endure repeated write actions over and over. That heavier focus on write-over-read results in the drive arriving noticeably lower in price than the WD Red Pro or WD Gold.
• The WD Red Pro 22TB HDD on the other hand has a much better Read/Write balance and although is not quite as high in it’s durability upon repeated/recycled writing, it makes up for it by being much better than the Purple Pro when it comes to mixed and sporadic access patterns, as a 24×7 large scale NAS server is likely to do
• The WD Gold 22TB is the premium Hard Drive of the three, with it’s excellent sustained read AND write, as well as high durability of 550TB per year workload, 2.5M MTBF hours and it’s suitability of deployment in hyperscale (12-24-48+ bay) rack environments of NAS or SAN. The only real downside compared with WD Red Pro and WD Purple Pro is that the drive is noisier and consumes more power in use to maintain those speeds and durability over time. The price tag of the WD Gold (at least at the time of writing) is higher than the WD Red Pro and WD Purple Pro too – though that can change later as larger capacities arrive and the RRP becomes increasingly flexible.

That is the core difference between all three 22TB HDDs that WD have released. But what about OptiNAND? Why is that a big deal?

What is OptiNAND and Why is it so Important on a big drive like the WD 22TB?

Of course, users who have been following the developments of WD in their roadmaps and reveals of larger-scale drive media will be aware that the WD Red Pro, Purple and Gold 22TB also features a new technological design being rolled out in these bigger drives to merge existing storage technologies into something even better – OptiNAND. This is a new approach to an old idea that never really took off, where the benefits of small areas of faster NAND storage (more typically associated with SSD media) and affords a small area of NAND to a larger scale hard drive to be used for metadata and for storing data in the event of power failure. Flash is also interesting from a persistence standpoint. DRAM gets flushed on power loss, but NAND is non-volatile and can continue to keep metadata information without having to re-hydrate after a boot sequence, be removed from the system for some reason, or any other event where power drops. The newer gen 18, 20 and 22TB hard drives arrives with a portion of 64-layer/64GB BICS3 (3D TLC)

WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.

The slice of iNAND has its own dedicated controller, much like an SSD. While metadata management itself doesn’t help to increase platter density, it enables a range of benefits that do. As one can imagine, the higher the density of the HDD, the more metadata it generates. Moving metadata to a fast, dense and scalable storage area gives more freedom for manufacturers to create higher capacity drives.

OptiNAND	DRAM

But why choose NAND over DRAM? Western Digital explained back in August 2021 that modern high-density HDDs generate gigabytes of metadata and it’s too costly to include sufficient  DRAM to hold it. In addition, moving metadata to their own dedicated area will free up more space on the platters themselves to store user data. There’s more to it than capacity increases, though; using OptiNAND also helps with reliability, specifically with the repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI).

Overall, what we find in the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB hard drive architecture is a solidly designed and hugely impressive piece of hardware that challenges alot of the standard conventions of hard drive storage (in AND outside of server use).

When Will the WD Red Pro, WD Gold and WD Purple Pro 22TB Hard Drive Be Released and the Price?

In short, all three 22TB Hard Drives are available NOW, as they were officially released by Western Digital Earlier today. Expect stock to take a little longer to arrive, maybe by the end of July ’22, but as we speak, they are being gradually added to WDD’s websites and online portals. Regarding pricing, only the WD Red Pro Price of £601 from WD themselves. The rest of the pricing of 22TB drives in WD Gold and Purple will likely hit circulation shortly.

Branding
Drive Family	GOLD	RED PRO	PURPLE PRO / AI
Price	£639.99 /  $769 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE	£601.99 /  $729 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE	£539.99 /  $649 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE

 

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Need Advice on Data Storage from an Expert?

Finally, for free advice about your setup, just leave a message in the comments below here at NASCompares.com and we will get back to you. Need Help? Where possible (and where appropriate) please provide as much information about your requirements, as then I can arrange the best answer and solution to your needs. Do not worry about your e-mail address being required, it will NOT be used in a mailing list and will NOT be used in any way other than to respond to your enquiry. [contact-form-7] TRY CHAT Terms and Conditions

If you like this service, please consider supporting us. We use affiliate links on the blog allowing NAScompares information and advice service to be free of charge to you.Anything you purchase on the day you click on our links will generate a small commission which isused to run the website. Here is a link for Amazon and B&H.You can also get me a Ko-fi or old school Paypal. Thanks!To find out more about how to support this advice service check HEREIf you need to fix or configure a NAS, check Fiver Have you thought about helping others with your knowledge? Find Instructions Here  

 

Or support us by using our affiliate links on Amazon UK and Amazon US

    

 

Alternatively, why not ask me on the ASK NASCompares forum, by clicking the button below. This is a community hub that serves as a place that I can answer your question, chew the fat, share new release information and even get corrections posted. I will always get around to answering ALL queries, but as a one-man operation, I cannot promise speed! So by sharing your query in the ASK NASCompares section below, you can get a better range of solutions and suggestions, alongside my own.

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We use affiliate links on the blog allowing NAScompares information and advice service to be free of charge to you. Anything you purchase on the day you click on our links will generate a small commission which is used to run the website. Here is a link for Amazon and B&H. You can also get me a Ko-fi or old school Paypal. Thanks! To find out more about how to support this advice service check HERE   If you need to fix or configure a NAS, check Fiver   Have you thought about helping others with your knowledge? Find Instructions Here  

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Or support us by using our affiliate links on Amazon UK and Amazon US

     

That’s Right! WD has now officially released their 22TB series of HDDs to the WD Gold, WD Red Pro and WD Purple Pro series of hard disks. So, why is this such a big deal? Well, anyone who has been watching the development of hard drives over at Western Digital will have surely noticed a tremendous change in strategy by one of (if not THE) biggest brand in hard drives in the last couple of years. For a long time, WD had been a little more cautious in it’s releasing of larger capacities (especially compared with their biggest rival Seagate) and was rarely the first to commercially release the biggest capacities into the consumer and business market. However, the last 24 months have seen WD change this development/release method dramatically and we have seen them release a wide variety of extremely high capacity HDDs into their respect ranges (we only JUST reviewed their 20TB WD Red Pro on YouTube and Western Digital Ultrastar HC560 20TB HDDs here on NASCompares shortly after release). Add to this that these larger capacity HDDs are getting added to each of the brand’s highest-profile product ranges (as well as the 26TB Ultrastar UltraSMR drives being released now in July ’22) and we are seeing a very, VERY different WD to one we saw back in 2019/2020. So, let’s take a closer look at these three new 22TB Hard Drives, what they are designed for and what separates them from one another!

Hardware Specifications of the WD Red Pro, WD Purple and WD Gold 22TB Hard Drives

The first thing to note is that these three 22TB hard drives is that they are designed very similarity in terms of standard hardware architecture. They are all 7200 RPM (rotations per min) and data is spread across 10 internal platters that are comprised of 2.2TB per platter. Despite it’s remarkable capacity, the drive uses traditional CMR/PMR, but is improved upon with the use of energy-assisted magnetic recording too. These amply internal physical storage spacing in accompanied with a huge 512MB of on board cache to keep things moving and each drive also features a small flash module on board known as OptiNAND (we will go into more detail on that in a moment). All three 2TB Hard drives are available in SATA/6Gb (and SAS options available in other model IDs), but thanks to small differences in the gearing of each drive to be better suited to their end user, the WD Red Pro and WD Purple Pro have a maximum reported 265MB/s Sustained Sequential Read and the WD Gold has a much higher and possibly industry winning (for SATA in traditional platter-arm design) 291MB/s Performance, almost half way saturating SATA 6Gb/s. Herre is a breakdown of the specifications of each of the WD 22TB Hard Disks:

Branding
Drive Family	GOLD	RED PRO	PURPLE PRO / AI
Price	£639.99 /  $769 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE	£601.99 /  $729 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE	£539.99 /  $649 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE
Model ID	WD221KRYZ	WD221KFGX	WD221PURP
Designed Use	Data-Center	Large Scale NAS	NAS Surveillance / NVR
RPM (Rotations per Minute)	7200RPM	7200RPM	7200RPM
Platter Density/Frequency	10 Platters (2.2TB each)	10 Platters (2.2TB each)	10 Platters (2.2TB each)
On-board Cache	512MB	512MB	512MB
Recording Method	EPMR	EPMR	EPMR
OptiNAND	Yes	Yes	Yes
Max Performance (aka Transfer	291	265	265
Workload Rating (TB per Year)	550	300	550
Load / Unload Cycle Rtaing	600K	600K	600K
Unrecoverable Read Errors	1 in 10E15	1 in 10E13	1 in 10E15
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure Hrs)	2.5M	1M	2.5M
Power Usage (Idle / Active) (W)	5.7 / 9.3	3.4 / 6.8	5.6 / 6.9
Manf Warranty	5	5	5

What is the Difference Between the 22TB WD Red Pro vs WD Gold vs WD Purple Pro HDD?

The WD Red Pro series of HDDs are designed for use in 24×7 NAS servers that are used in Medium-large businesses (recommended for any system in desktop or rackmount above 8 bays). The WD Gold series is designed for Enterprise, Data Center and/or Hyper-scale deployment, as they are geared towards a much faster spin up and spin down, whilst also ensuring high sustained speeds over time and can endure larger scales of write-delete-re-write throughout their lifespan (something very common in enterprise hot-warm-cold storage systems that use different media types at each tier). Finally, there is the WD Purple Por series, a range of drives specifically geared towards surveillance (cameras and data recording instruments generally) and although similar in deployment to the WD Red Pro series (ie small-medium-large business and above 8 bays of storage per system), the main difference is that WD Purple is significant;y geared more towards Write than read, as NVR/Surveillance-servers will spend 95%+ of there operations time WRITING data from recording cameras etc , whilst 5% or less will be spent retrieving/viewing those recordings.

The main difference between all three in terms of actual use is:

• The WD Purple 22TB is an HDD that will allow a tremendously sustainable Write Speed over time but not at the expense of durability, thanks to a high 2.5M MTBF and 550TB annual workload. Therefore ensuring that surveillance recordings are consistent and the drive will have sufficient robust hardware to endure repeated write actions over and over. That heavier focus on write-over-read results in the drive arriving noticeably lower in price than the WD Red Pro or WD Gold.
• The WD Red Pro 22TB HDD on the other hand has a much better Read/Write balance and although is not quite as high in it’s durability upon repeated/recycled writing, it makes up for it by being much better than the Purple Pro when it comes to mixed and sporadic access patterns, as a 24×7 large scale NAS server is likely to do
• The WD Gold 22TB is the premium Hard Drive of the three, with it’s excellent sustained read AND write, as well as high durability of 550TB per year workload, 2.5M MTBF hours and it’s suitability of deployment in hyperscale (12-24-48+ bay) rack environments of NAS or SAN. The only real downside compared with WD Red Pro and WD Purple Pro is that the drive is noisier and consumes more power in use to maintain those speeds and durability over time. The price tag of the WD Gold (at least at the time of writing) is higher than the WD Red Pro and WD Purple Pro too – though that can change later as larger capacities arrive and the RRP becomes increasingly flexible.

That is the core difference between all three 22TB HDDs that WD have released. But what about OptiNAND? Why is that a big deal?

What is OptiNAND and Why is it so Important on a big drive like the WD 22TB?

Of course, users who have been following the developments of WD in their roadmaps and reveals of larger-scale drive media will be aware that the WD Red Pro, Purple and Gold 22TB also features a new technological design being rolled out in these bigger drives to merge existing storage technologies into something even better – OptiNAND. This is a new approach to an old idea that never really took off, where the benefits of small areas of faster NAND storage (more typically associated with SSD media) and affords a small area of NAND to a larger scale hard drive to be used for metadata and for storing data in the event of power failure. Flash is also interesting from a persistence standpoint. DRAM gets flushed on power loss, but NAND is non-volatile and can continue to keep metadata information without having to re-hydrate after a boot sequence, be removed from the system for some reason, or any other event where power drops. The newer gen 18, 20 and 22TB hard drives arrives with a portion of 64-layer/64GB BICS3 (3D TLC)

WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.

The slice of iNAND has its own dedicated controller, much like an SSD. While metadata management itself doesn’t help to increase platter density, it enables a range of benefits that do. As one can imagine, the higher the density of the HDD, the more metadata it generates. Moving metadata to a fast, dense and scalable storage area gives more freedom for manufacturers to create higher capacity drives.

OptiNAND	DRAM

But why choose NAND over DRAM? Western Digital explained back in August 2021 that modern high-density HDDs generate gigabytes of metadata and it’s too costly to include sufficient  DRAM to hold it. In addition, moving metadata to their own dedicated area will free up more space on the platters themselves to store user data. There’s more to it than capacity increases, though; using OptiNAND also helps with reliability, specifically with the repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI).

Overall, what we find in the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB hard drive architecture is a solidly designed and hugely impressive piece of hardware that challenges alot of the standard conventions of hard drive storage (in AND outside of server use).

When Will the WD Red Pro, WD Gold and WD Purple Pro 22TB Hard Drive Be Released and the Price?

In short, all three 22TB Hard Drives are available NOW, as they were officially released by Western Digital Earlier today. Expect stock to take a little longer to arrive, maybe by the end of July ’22, but as we speak, they are being gradually added to WDD’s websites and online portals. Regarding pricing, only the WD Red Pro Price of £601 from WD themselves. The rest of the pricing of 22TB drives in WD Gold and Purple will likely hit circulation shortly.

Branding
Drive Family	GOLD	RED PRO	PURPLE PRO / AI
Price	£639.99 /  $769 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE	£601.99 /  $729 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE	£539.99 /  $649 (Est on Conversion) Check Amazon HERE

 

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Want to follow specific category? Also Read...Black Friday 2024 - Data StoraBlack Friday 2024 - Data Stora10 Historic NAS Ransomware andAmazon Prime Day 2024 Deals InTerramaster Deals - 10% DiscouLeaving WD and Netgear? - BestIntroducing the WD Red Pro 24TCyber Monday 2023 Deals in StoBlack Friday 2023 Deals in StoAmazon Prime Day October 2023 Subscribe

You can also follow specific search terms:

This description contains links to Amazon. These links will take you to some of the products mentioned in today's content. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Visit the NASCompares Deal Finder to find the best place to buy this device in your region, based on Service, Support and Reputation - Just Search for your NAS Drive in the Box Below

Need Advice on Data Storage from an Expert?

Finally, for free advice about your setup, just leave a message in the comments below here at NASCompares.com and we will get back to you. Need Help? Where possible (and where appropriate) please provide as much information about your requirements, as then I can arrange the best answer and solution to your needs. Do not worry about your e-mail address being required, it will NOT be used in a mailing list and will NOT be used in any way other than to respond to your enquiry. [contact-form-7] TRY CHAT Terms and Conditions

If you like this service, please consider supporting us. We use affiliate links on the blog allowing NAScompares information and advice service to be free of charge to you.Anything you purchase on the day you click on our links will generate a small commission which isused to run the website. Here is a link for Amazon and B&H.You can also get me a Ko-fi or old school Paypal. Thanks!To find out more about how to support this advice service check HEREIf you need to fix or configure a NAS, check Fiver Have you thought about helping others with your knowledge? Find Instructions Here  

 

Or support us by using our affiliate links on Amazon UK and Amazon US

    

 

Alternatively, why not ask me on the ASK NASCompares forum, by clicking the button below. This is a community hub that serves as a place that I can answer your question, chew the fat, share new release information and even get corrections posted. I will always get around to answering ALL queries, but as a one-man operation, I cannot promise speed! So by sharing your query in the ASK NASCompares section below, you can get a better range of solutions and suggestions, alongside my own.

WE LOVE COFFEE

 

Over the last few years of NAS Drive releases from brands like Synology, QNAP and Asustor, we have seen most Prosumer and SMB releases arriving with support of either M.2 NVMe SSD bays, or PCIe slots that allow you to add this feature in the system’s lifespan. The appeal of SSD cache has grown considerably in recent years, as the demands in speed and responsiveness of the data on NAS drives has grown considerably. Despite the well-established fact that SSDs are faster than Hard drives, there is no ignoring that the available capacity and price point of hard drives makes them ultimately more viable and desirable in a NAS than SSDs. However, SSD Caching serves as a nice middle ground, allowing you to enjoy the bigger and lower cost hard drive RAID storage pools, but also adding two or more individual SSDs to bolster the system in performance. The Seagate Ironwolf 510 and WD Red SN700 are SSD’s that are designed with NAS use in mind and can be used in the process of write caching (where data is written to the faster performing SSD first, then migrated over to the HDDs), read caching (whereby more frequently accessed data is copied over to the SSDs in order to seed up their access by connected clients) or both together. There are numerous other SSD caching methods and protocols, but these are ultimately the most common and today I want to help you decide which NAS SSD you should install in your NAS Drive. There is around an 18-month release date difference between these two SSDs and although both are M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen 3×4 SSDs, there is a large degree of difference in their architecture to take into consideration. So let’s compare the WD Red SN700 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 and see which one deserves your cache.

It is worth remembering that the two SSDs in today’s comparison are m.2 NVMe in architecture and although PCIe Gen 4 is compatible with Gen 3 and old, they will not suitable for NAS drives with M.2 SATA connections. We have seen more modern NAS systems released in the last few years abandon m.2 SATA in favour of its PCIe counterpart, but both Seagate and WD both provide SATA alternatives in their Ironwolf and WD Red series. Examples of SATA SSDs for NAS can be found HERE on Amazon.

How do the WD Red SN700 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 SSD Compare on Specs?

Both WD and Seagate are well known for their wide ranges of hard drive and SSD media, as well as both being pioneers of NAS server focused SSDs for caching and flash storage. Although SSDs are all built to a similar ground-level architecture, they will often have their later development shifted in favour of a specific targetted use. This is not a big surprise and much like the cutlery in your kitchen draw, they might be similar but one tool is much better at some tasks than others – ever tried using a spreading butter with a meat-claver? Or stirring tea with a ladle? The WD Red SN700 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 SSD are NAS targetted and although the performance is good, the true stand out factor in this design is the durability of the drive. SSDs for use in NAS systems will in most cases be used for caching and that means a very frequent turnover (i.e. data wrote, updated, deleted, repeat) daily as the demands of client users and devices change. Both of these SSDs arrive with a high level of durability and workload rating, but the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and WD Red SN700 definitely have differing ideas of preliminary architecture and what that price tag is being spent on. Let’s look at the shared base-level SSD architecture of each SSD (available on every capacity):

Below Specifications are taken from official brand sources, data sheets and reputable sources (real-world tests we performed ourselves are a little lower in the article):

As you might know, WD develops practically all of their SSDs ‘in-house’ and feature proprietary NVMe controllers, subsidiary company NAND (in this case Sandisk) and this allows them to be able to control availability and pricing in a way that most other SSD brands cannot. Seagate uses 3rd party controllers and NAND manufacturers for the most part in their ranges, but are still generally quite top tier providers. The release time difference between the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and WD Red SN700 makes an impressive difference here in terms of the hardware on offer on either SSD, with the more recently released WD Red SN700 having notably superior connectivity, NAND quality and overall performance. The older Seagate Ironwolf 510 SSD features 3years of forensic level data recovery services though (which caching NAS users might want to have in the event of ‘trapped data’ during write caching operations and a critical system failure/power-cut) which is very unique to the brand. However, overall the WD Red SN700 has the superior architecture here. Below is how the building blocks of the WD Red SN700 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 result in throughput, IOPS and Durability at each capacity tier (based on officially provided figures):

Overall, it should come as no surprise that the WD Red SN700 SSD is the notable leader here in practically all official benchmarks over the slightly older Seagate Ironwolf 510 SSD, thanks to that improved architecture. Most notably in write performance and IOPS in general, it had a clear lead even in the lowest available capacities. Of course, these are officially provided performance figures and represent maximums based on the highest available hardware at the time of release. Let’s take a look at how these two SSDs compare in our own tests.

How Did the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and WD Red SN700 SSD Compare in OUR Tests?

Moving away from the official performance stats provided by WD and Seagate, I wanted to see how the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and WD Red SN700 compared in my own tests. Testing of these two SSDs will be broken down into 3 main parts, a CrystalDisk Benchmark test, Atto Disk Benchmark Test and an AJA media test. In each test, the SSD was in the 2nd storage slot (i.e not the OS drive). Each test was conducted three times and the system was left for 1 minute between tests to allow the SSD time to stabilize. The specifications of the test machine are:

Test Machine:

• Windows 10 Pro Desktop System
• Intel i5 11400 Rocket Lake – 6-Core 2.6/4.4Ghz
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory
• Intel B560M mATX Motherboard
• OS Storage, Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD
• Test SSD connected to Secondary PCIe Gen 4×4 M.2 Slot

CrystalDisk 1GB Test File – Read, Write, 70/30% Mixed and IOPS Performance

CrystalDisk is still highly regarded as one of the most reliable tools for measuring storage media performance. Though it does create somewhat high-end results that may not be truly indicative of your own real-world setup, it can be used to display maximum potential throughput and IOPs at each tier. The first test for the Seagate Ionwolf 510 and WD Red SN700 was on a 1GB test file:

Overall Winner: The WD Red SN700 SSD

CrystalDisk 4GB Test File – Read, Write, 70/30% Mixed and IOPS Performance

The next test was to perform the same parameters in CrystalDisk on the WD Red SN700 and Seagate Ironwolf 510, but this time with a 4GB test file (larger files may result in higher sequential performance, but lower comparative IOPS):

Overall Winner: The WD Red SN700 SSD

ATTO DiskBenchmark 256MB Test File – Read, Write

Switching things up, I then moved testing the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and WD Red SN700 SSD over to ATTO disk benchmark. A far more detailed tool that spreads performance testing over different file and block sizes. I started with the smallest ‘full range’ test file of 256MB (as smaller would reduce the range of block sizes). Here is how each SSD compared:

Overall Winner: The WD Red SN700 SSD

ATTO DiskBenchmark 4GB Test File – Read, Write

Sticking with ATTO DiskBenchmark, I then moved the testing of the WD Red SN700 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 onto a x16 bigger test file of 4GB. This would certainly shift where the peaks in performance would sit and hopefully produce a clearer disparity between these two SSDs:

Overall Winner: The WD Red SN700 SSD

AJA 1080i Media Test 1GB Test File – Read, Write

I then switched to AJA, a popular media testing tool for video formats. Most SSDs will suffer over-saturated Memory/DRAM/SDRAM as sustained large file tests go on. The 1GB file test of AJA on the WD Red SN700 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 is still a small enough value not to be a problem though and we chiefly focused on the disk playback/reads graph to see how they compared in peak performance and also throughout the transfer:

Overall Winner: The WD Red SN700 SSD

AJA 1080i Media Test 16GB Test File – Read, Write

Then we used a much, MUCH heavier test in AJA of 16GB on the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and WD Red SN700 SSD. Unsurprisingly this can often overflow the SSD cache/memory on board and result in a dip in performance as the SSD bottlenecks internally. So, when conducting this test, we are looking at peak performance AND how long the SSD maintained that performance before a potential dip. Here is how these two SSD compared:

Overall Winner: The WD Red SN700 SSD

WD Red SN700 vs Seagate Ironwolf 510 SSD – The Results

It will come as little surprise that in the case of comparing the WD Red SN700 and Seagate Ironwolf 510, the more recently released and more modern architecture WD SSD was the victor in the majority of tests (both official 1st party and my own). Although it has taken WD almost a year and a half to release a competitor NAS NVMe SSD to Seagate’s entry, it is unquestionable the better performing drive as it takes advantage of numerous newer innovations in SSD architecture that have been developed and released in that time. The Durability across the entire range of the Ironwolf 510 series and three years of inclusive forensic level data recovery do make the Seagate Ironwolf an attractive choice in 2021, but in NAS use, general use and performance overall, the WD Red SN700 wins the day.

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#RunWithIronWolf and #WDRedNAS . This unit was supplied by @seagate and @WesternDigitalCorporation .The review provided was free of bias and my own independent opinions

The Seagate Ironwolf series of NAS media has been around for a few years now and what started as a rebranding of their ‘NAS’ labelled series has now become a multi-tiered series of Hard drives and SSDs. Recently Seagate introduced a new entry into their Ironwolf SSD series with the 525 NVMe SSD. Presented as a higher bandwidth supporting alternative NVMe SSD to the Ironwolf 510 (released back in March 2020), the Ironwolf 525 is a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD that arrives in slightly larger capacities, much higher performance and still allowing backwards compatibility with PCIe Gen 3 m.2 slots in your NAS. So, with the release of this newer, faster and widely supported NVMe SSD, should you still consider buying the Seagate Ironwolf 510 at all? Well, yes! The older Ironwolf 510 still arrives with a few rather unique architecture and design choices that are not available in the Ironwolf 525 and today I want to take a close look at each of these NAS focused SSDs and help you decide which one you should buy for your NAS drive in 2021/2022.

Important – It is worth remembering that the two SSDs in today’s comparison are m.2 NVMe in architecture and although PCIe Gen 4 is compatible with Gen 3 and old, they will not suitable for NAS drives with M.2 SATA connections. We have seen more modern NAS systems released in the last few years abandon m.2 SATA in favour of its PCIe counterpart, but Seagate provides SATA alternatives in their Ironwolf series. Examples of SATA SSDs for NAS can be found HERE on Amazon. Additionally, it is worth highlighting for the later stages of testing in this comparison, I was only able to obtain the 240GB model of the Ironwolf 510, so although the performance shown is low (and much lower than the Ironwolf 525 as expected in most cases) it is particularly low because the test drive is the 240GB Model. Please follow the official performance specifications in the table below for a better indication of how comparable capacity drives would differ.

How do the Seagate Ironwolf 525 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 SSD Compare on Specs?

Seagate are well known for their wide ranges of hard drive and SSD media, as well as both being pioneers of NAS server focused SSDs for caching and flash storage. Although SSDs are all built to a similar ground-level architecture, they will often have their later development shifted in favour of a specific targetted use. This is not a big surprise and much like the cutlery in your kitchen draw, they might be similar but one tool is much better at some tasks than others – ever tried using a spreading butter with a meat-claver? Or stirring tea with a ladle? The Seagate Ironwolf 525 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 SSD are NAS targetted and although the performance is good, the true stand out factor in this design is the durability of the drive. SSDs for use in NAS systems will in most cases be used for caching and that means a very frequent turnover (i.e. data wrote, updated, deleted, repeat) daily as the demands of client users and devices change. Both of these SSDs arrive with a high level of durability and workload rating, but the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and Seagate Ironwolf 525 definitely have differing ideas of preliminary architecture and what that price tag is being spent on. Let’s look at the shared base-level SSD architecture of each SSD (available on every capacity):

Below Specifications are taken from official brand sources, data sheets and reputable sources (real-world tests we performed ourselves are a little lower in the article):

Seagate uses 3rd party controllers and NAND manufacturers for the most part in their ranges, but are still generally quite top tier providers. The release time difference between the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and Seagate Ironwolf 525 makes an impressive difference here in terms of the hardware on offer on either SSD, with the more recently released Seagate Ironwolf 525 having notably superior connectivity, NAND quality and overall performance. Both Seagate Ironwolf SSDs features 3 years of forensic level data recovery services though (which caching NAS users might want to have in the event of ‘trapped data’ during write caching operations and a critical system failure/power-cut) which is very unique to the brand. However, overall the Seagate Ironwolf 525 has the superior architecture here. Below is how the building blocks of the Seagate Ironwolf 525 and Seagate Ironwolf 510 result in throughput, IOPS and Durability at each capacity tier (based on officially provided figures):

Overall, it should come as no surprise that the Seagate Ironwolf 525 is the notable leader here in practically all official benchmarks over the slightly older Seagate Ironwolf 510 SSD, thanks to that improved architecture. Most notably in write performance and IOPS in general, it had a clear lead even in the lowest available capacities. Of course, these are officially provided performance figures and represent maximums based on the highest available hardware at the time of release. Let’s take a look at how these two SSDs compare in our own tests.

How Did the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and Seagate Ironwolf 525 Compare in OUR Tests?

Moving away from the official performance stats provided by WD and Seagate, I wanted to see how the Seagate Ironwolf 510 and 525 compared in my own tests. Testing of these two SSDs will be broken down into 3 main parts, a CrystalDisk Benchmark test, Atto Disk Benchmark Test and an AJA media test. In each test, the SSD was in the 2nd storage slot (i.e not the OS drive). Each test was conducted three times and the system was left for 1 minute between tests to allow the SSD time to stabilize. The specifications of the test machine are:

Test Machine:

• Windows 10 Pro Desktop System
• Intel i5 11400 Rocket Lake – 6-Core 2.6/4.4Ghz
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory
• Intel B560M mATX Motherboard
• OS Storage, Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD
• Test SSD connected to Secondary PCIe Gen 4×4 M.2 Slot

CrystalDisk 1GB Test File – Read, Write, 70/30% Mixed and IOPS Performance

CrystalDisk is still highly regarded as one of the most reliable tools for measuring storage media performance. Though it does create somewhat high-end results that may not be truly indicative of your own real-world setup, it can be used to display maximum potential throughput and IOPs at each tier. The first test for the Seagate Ionwolf 510 and Seagate Ironwolf 525 was on a 1GB test file: