With 4TB capacity, these drives are ideal for bulk storage duties, such as JBODs, compute servers, video surveillance and other demanding write-intensive applications. With Western Digital’s stated field-tested 1.2 million hour MTBF, the drive is expected to deliver the highest level of reliability for 24×7 operations. To build upon the reliability, Western Digital puts the drives through extended burn in testing with thermal cycling to ensure reliable operation. This reliability is what allows Enterprise have confidence and security that their operations won’t be effected by data failures or drive failures that could cripple an operation.

Western Digital offers three Enterprise class drives to their consumers, RE – SATA 6Gbps & 3Gbps, RE – SAS 6Gbps and Xe – SAS 6Gbps. Both the RE classes are a 3.5″ form-factor and range from 250GB to 4TB capacities. The Xe class, which is an Ultra-fast SAS drive, comes in 300GB to 900GB capacities. The Western Digital RE 4TB stands at top of Enterprise class capacities for Western Digital.

With the growing trend toward Cloud-based servers, companies are looking for more and more higher capacity drives and the manufacturers are responding with 4TB capacities and rumored 6TB to 8TB drives down the road. The market is already filled with offerings from Hitachi, Seagate and Toshiba in 4TB capacities, so look for us to have reviews of these down the road.

Western Digital RE 4TB Enterprise Specifications (WD4000FYYZ)

• Capacity: 4TB
• Interfaces: SATA 6Gbps
• Sustained Sequential Transfer Speed: 171MB/s
• User Sectors Per Drive: 7,814,037,168
• Physical Dimensions: Height 1.028 Inches, Depth 5.787 Inches, Width 4.00 Inches
• Operating Shock (Read): 30G, 2 ms
• Non-operating Shock: 300G, 2 ms
• (Acoustics) Idle Mode: 31 dBA (average)
• (Acoustics) Seek Mode 0: 34 dBA (average)
• Temperature
  • Operating 41° F to 131° F (5^o C to 55^o C)
  • Non-operating -40° F to 158° F (-41^o C to 70^o C)
• Power Dissipation
  • Read/Write 9.70/9.50 Watts
  • Idle 8.60 Watts

Aesthetics

The Western Digital RE hard drives have little difference in appearance from their consumer counterparts, except the nice bright yellow label stating “Enterprise Storage.” It is a nice touch just in case you have a bunch of drives in your spare parts box, as it would be difficult at first glance to tell what is Enterprise or what is a Consumer Western Digital Drive.

The Western Digital RE 4TB is a standard 3.5″ hard drive based on a SATA 6Gbps interface. We see the standard practice of Western Digital to place the heat-producing components in contact with the body of the drive. This allows things like the controller, RAM, and motor driver to dispense heat into the body acting as a large heat sink. Also, Western Digital makes use of a foam pad placed in between the drive and circuit board to help absorb vibration.

The circuit board includes a Marvell 88i9346 controller, as well as 64MB DDR2 of RAM from the Hynix H5PS5162GFR-S6C module.

Testing Background and Comparables

Comparables for this review:

• 2TB Western Digital RE4
• 3TB Seagate Constellation ES.2

All enterprise HDDs are benchmarked on our enterprise testing platform based on a Lenovo ThinkServer RD240. The ThinkServer RD240 is configured with:

• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650 (2.66GHz, 12MB Cache)
• Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition R2 SP1 64-Bit and CentOS 6.2 64-Bit
• Intel 5500+ ICH10R Chipset
• Memory – 8GB (2 x 4GB) 1333Mhz DDR3 Registered RDIMMs
• LSI 9211 SAS/SATA 6.0Gb/s HBA

Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis

Our enterprise hard drive benchmark process preconditions each drive into steady-state with the same workload the device will be tested with under a heavy load of 16 threads with an outstanding queue of 16 per thread, and then tested in set intervals in multiple thread/queue depth profiles to show performance under light and heavy usage. Since hard drives reach their rated performance level very quickly, we only graph out the main sections of each test.

Preconditioning and Primary Steady-State Tests:

• Throughput (Read+Write IOPS Aggregate)
• Average Latency (Read+Write Latency Averaged Together)
• Max Latency (Peak Read or Write Latency)
• Latency Standard Deviation (Read+Write Standard Deviation Averaged Together)

Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes four profiles based on real-world tasks. These profiles have been developed to make it easier to compare to our past benchmarks as well as widely-published values such as max 4K read and write speed and 8K 70/30, which is commonly used for enterprise drives. We also included two legacy mixed workloads, the traditional File Server and Webserver, each offering a wide mix of transfer sizes.

• 4K
  • 100% Read or 100% Write
  • 100% 4K
• 8K 70/30
  • 70% Read, 30% Write
  • 100% 8K
• 128K (Sequential)
  • 100% Read or 100% Write
  • 100% 128K
• File Server
  • 80% Read, 20% Write
  • 10% 512b, 5% 1k, 5% 2k, 60% 4k, 2% 8k, 4% 16k, 4% 32k, 10% 64k
• Webserver
  • 100% Read
  • 22% 512b, 15% 1k, 8% 2k, 23% 4k, 15% 8k, 2% 16k, 6% 32k, 7% 64k, 1% 128k, 1% 512k

Our first enterprise workloads, we measured a long sample of random 4K performance with 100% write and 100% read activity to get our main results. The Western Digital RE 4TB measured 139 IOPS read and 208 IOPS write, which closely matches the performance of the Western Digital RE 2TB.