Western Digital’s Red series of NAS hard drives has verified to be a champion for the company, with outstanding performance and stability, making them the NAS drive of choice for numerous system designers. Until fairly recently, the biggest capacity was 8TB, but WD has simply bumped this to 10TB, making it one of the biggest mechanical drives on the marketplace.

The brand new WD 10TB model is limited to a optimum of 8 drives in a NAS, but that’s still a whopping 80TB of storage.It’s constructed using the HelioSeal helium-technology as prior WD Red drives, which replaces the air inside of the hard drive with helium. This is one seventh the density of regular air, and allows for much better overall performance and durability.
It’s created inside a typical 3.5-inch drive chassis, and also includes WD’s NASware 3.0 technology. This is designed to enhance hard drive reliability and system performance, as well as optimizing the drive for use in a multi-drive environment.
The drive contains a 256MB cache, while the 7 platters inside spin at 5,400RPM.There is a three-year limited warranty included, but not much more in the way of software for backing up older systems. Connectivity is through the SATA 3 6Gbps port, which is excellent for a
mechanical drive.
We used CrystalDiskMark to calculate performance, and noticed sequential read speeds of 211.5MB/s and write speeds of 212.4MB/sec. Heading down to 4K efficiency, we see
0.714MB/sec read speeds and 2.767MB/sec write speeds. This puts it on par with
other NAS drives, even though it’s by no means the quickest hard drive.

It’s not quite the most economical mechanical hard drive on the block, nor the fastest, but that 10TB in size will be valued by those with NAS products that don’t have a variety
of bays to fill. WD has nailed it once again with the latest iteration of the Red, and there’s
even a Pro version for $100 more that has a five-year warranty and runs at 7,200 RPM. To be sincere, we would probably pay out that little extra for the overall performance jump, but even at 5,400 RPM the WD Red 10TB does just okay.

WD Red 10TB specifications:

• Model Number: WD100EFAX
• Interface: SATA 6 Gb/s
• Capacity: 10TB
• Form factor: 3.5”
• Cache: 256MB
• RPM: 5,400
• Advanced Format
• Native Command Queuing
• Power Management-12VDC-/+10% (A, peak): 1.79
• Temperature (°C)
  • Operating:  0 to 65
  • Non-operating: -40 to 70
• Shock (Gs)
  • Operating (2ms, read/write): 30
  • Operating (2ms, read): 65
  • Non-operating (2ms): 250
• Acoustics (dBA)
• Idle: 20
• Seek (average): 29
• Physical Dimensions
  • Height (in/mm, max) 1.028/26.1
  • Length (in/mm, max) 5.787/147
  • Width (in/mm, ± .01in) 4/101.6
  • Weight (lb/kg, ± 10%) 1.43/0.65
• Warranty: 3 years

photo:WD