Benchmark: WD Red NAS

My wife is in the market for large, cheap drives with decent performance to store sequencing data, so I ordered and tested a 2 TB Western Digital Red NAS (WD20EFRX—no link because wdc.com is broken at the moment). The Red series seems to be a halfway point between the WD Green and WD Black series: like the Green series, they have 4096-byte sectors and IntelliPower (i.e. variable rpm), but they are designed for 24×7 operation and seem to have far more consistent performance—although not quite on par with the Black series.

The big news is that this is the first Advanced Format disk I’ve seen that correctly reports its physical sector size:

protocol              ATA/ATAPI-9 SATA 3.x
device model          WDC WD20EFRX-68AX9N0
firmware revision     80.00A80
serial number         WD-WMC301592199
WWN                   50014ee6adf1fbaf
cylinders             16383
heads                 16
sectors/track         63
sector size           logical 512, physical 4096, offset 0
LBA supported         268435455 sectors
LBA48 supported       3907029168 sectors
PIO supported         PIO4
DMA supported         WDMA2 UDMA6

As shown below, random-access performance is decent, but not mind-blowing—with the important caveat that I tested it on a machine that only has SATA I. I will update the numbers if and when I get the chance to test it on a machine with a SATA II or SATA III controller.

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps

   32768    4096       0   16384       10222    3205   12822
   32768    4096     512   16384       33900     966    3866
   32768    4096    1024   16384       35417     925    3700
   32768    4096    2048   16384       36207     905    3620

   16384    8192       0   32768        8298    1974   15794
   16384    8192     512   32768       31238     524    4195
   16384    8192    1024   32768       31666     517    4139
   16384    8192    2048   32768       31547     519    4154
   16384    8192    4096   32768        8037    2038   16307

    8192   16384       0   65536        6471    1265   20252
    8192   16384     512   65536       27815     294    4712
    8192   16384    1024   65536       27201     301    4818
    8192   16384    2048   65536       27607     296    4747
    8192   16384    4096   65536        6722    1218   19497
    8192   16384    8192   65536        6396    1280   20489

    4096   32768       0  131072        5199     787   25210
    4096   32768     512  131072       22564     181    5808
    4096   32768    1024  131072       23349     175    5613
    4096   32768    2048  131072       20816     196    6296
    4096   32768    4096  131072        5540     739   23655
    4096   32768    8192  131072        5307     771   24693
    4096   32768   16384  131072        5303     772   24716

Sequential performance is also pretty decent:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada2 bs=1m count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 8.881374 secs (120898164 bytes/sec)

2 thoughts on “Benchmark: WD Red NAS”

Does this mean that you don’t have to do any “4k stuff” when you use these with ZFS, as per Ivan’s guide?

http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2011-01-01.freebsd-on-4k-sector-drives.html

Thanks

Dag-Erling Smørgrav says:

2013-07-10 at 09:47
That’s a good question with a complex answer.

When a disk reports different logical and physical sector sizes, as this one does, the ada driver reports the logical sector size as sectorsize and the physical sector size as stripesize (otherwise, stripesize is 0). Furthermore, the driver has a list of disks which misreport their physical sector sizes, and will report stripesize as 4096 instead of 0 for disks on that list. There is also a tunable (kern.cam.ada.X.quirks=1) in case you come across a misbehaving disk that isn’t on the list.

The question, then, is whether and how ZFS uses that information. Unfortunately, I don’t think it does—it relies unconditionally on sectorsize:
```
        /*
         * Determine the device's minimum transfer size.
         */
        *ashift = highbit(MAX(pp->sectorsize, SPA_MINBLOCKSIZE)) - 1;
```
(from sys/cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/fs/zfs/vdev_geom.c)

This should be easy to fix, though. I’m sure Pawel will be happy to review your patch ;)
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2 thoughts on “Benchmark: WD Red NAS”

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