Western Digital RED 8TB Helium HDD Review

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There is a review of the Western Digital RED 8TB helium filled hard drive posted today at HardwareCanucks. If you are in need of storage space, you'll surely want to give this review a look.

Alongside the obvious performance-driven challenges, HDD manufacturers have also hit up against two other walls: one which limited platter density and the other which is a rather large but still spatially-constrained 3.5” form factor. In order to leap ahead in both those respects, Western Digital’s new RED 8TB’s platters are filled with helium and then sealed.

 
8tb though. That's scary to trust all that data to one drive. I thought 4tb was bad.
 
You should never ever trust data to a single device (or even a raid array) regardless of how much you pay for it.
 
I haven't heard about a scourge of drive failures.
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However having a > 2% chance of failure each year should make you consider backups if you care for your data.
 
dewbak75 said:
To be fair, the whole point of those drives is to use them in multi-drive arrays, where one expects to see either single- or multi-drive fault tolerance. And when it comes to the 4TB, I haven't heard about a scourge of drive failures.
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You mean you haven't heard of Seagate :rolleyes:
 
nutzo said:
You mean you haven't heard of Seagate :rolleyes:
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Funny :) But I'm serious, I haven't seen a story beyond urban legend word of mouth about higher than average failure rates on 4TB drives compared to smaller models. If you have a link to one, I'd love to read it.
 
As these drives get larger, it certainly makes the RAID type and rebuild time considerations more interesting. I'm planning on building a new ~10TB array and I'm spending a lot of time reading up about RAIDZ/RAID/VDRVs and other ZFS-related topics.
 
dewbak75 said:
Funny :) But I'm serious, I haven't seen a story beyond urban legend word of mouth about higher than average failure rates on 4TB drives compared to smaller models. If you have a link to one, I'd love to read it.
Click to expand...

I'm being serious myself, to be honest I wouldn't use a Seagate myself in a system if they handed me one, and that was way before 4TB came out, but that is just my opinion from the past.
 
MongGrel said:
I'm being serious myself, to be honest I wouldn't use a Seagate myself in a system if they handed me one, and that was way before 4TB came out, but that is just my opinion from the past.
Click to expand...

Which gets back to my point, is there any objective, at least semi-scientific study of reliability for 4TB drives vs. smaller models, or is it all self-perpetuating word of mouth?
 
dewbak75 said:
To be fair, the whole point of those drives is to use them in multi-drive arrays, where one expects to see either single- or multi-drive fault tolerance. And when it comes to the 4TB, I haven't heard about a scourge of drive failures.
Click to expand...
Even with RAID6, I would be weary of storing 7-8TB of data on these drives, mainly due to the massive rebuild time requirements.
It would be one thing if they were faster, hence shorter rebuild times, but with HDDs as they are, this is quite the risk outside of enterprise.

Maybe I'm just being overly cautious, but one or two failed disks in an array, and goodbye data.
 
Red Falcon said:
Even with RAID6, I would be weary of storing 7-8TB of data on these drives, mainly due to the massive rebuild time requirements.
It would be one thing if they were faster, hence shorter rebuild times, but with HDDs as they are, this is quite the risk outside of enterprise.

Maybe I'm just being overly cautious, but one or two failed disks in an array, and goodbye data.
Click to expand...

I agree that 5400 drives would suck to rebuild, but if you have RAID 6 running, odds are youll be okay
 
Hi, I'm using a 8 TB red drive in windows and find that transfer speed goes to zero periodically when copying large files. Has anyone else experienced this? I have also tried these drives in a RAID6 array on an Areca 1882 card and see the same issue; high transfer rate for 5-6 seconds and then zero for 2 seconds before speeding up again, and then zero again...etc. and ideas? Thanks!
 
Nice sized drive, though this kind of thing is another nail in the coffin of RAID-5.

Makes me pause a bit when running RAID-Z2 even. Do you all think it makes sense to stay a size or two behind the cutting edge and up the number of HDDs a bit instead of rlying on these huge platters?
 
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