Tl;dr: WD claims: Higher-perf than its "green" line of hard drives (but not as good as "black"), greater MTBF, lower power consumption than comparable drives, rated for 10°F hotter conditions than previous WD offerings.
> Higher-perf than its "green" line of hard drives (but not as good as "black")
So better performance than drives optimised for low power consumption and less performance (but less power consumed) than drives optimised for performance. Sounds like their blue line.
> rated for 10°F hotter conditions than previous WD offerings
Now that is useful assuming the rating isn't artificially inflated somehow (or the other drives deflated) - the heat build up in little NAS boxes packed with drives can be rather considerable.
It would probably be more accurate to say this is the first hard disk for NAS sold to a consumer market.
All storage vendors sell NAS specific hard drives. Typically called 'enterprise SATA' or 'enterprise SAS'. They have similar enhancements as this, but they work with the storage vendor to tune the firmware in the controller to the expected workload pattern (vs. a general DAS workload)
I'd not heard of it before, and a quick poke at the internet doesn't really show anything beyond a move to 4k sectors (and therefore presumably less efficient storage for lots of small files).
Is there something more I should know about? (in the market for a new home storage box soonish)
You get a huge performance impact if the OS doesn't align the clusters to the sectors. From the wikipedia article:
The translation process is more complicated when writing data that is either not a multiple of 4K or not aligned to a 4K boundary. In these instances, the hard drive must read the entire 4,096-byte sector containing the targeted data into internal memory, integrate the new data into the previously existing data and then rewrite the entire 4,096-byte sector onto the disk media. This operation, known as read-modify-write (RMW), can require additional revolution of the magnetic disks, resulting in a perceptible performance impact to the system user
Most of the OSes correctly align the advanced format sectors.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 21.0 ms ] threadSo better performance than drives optimised for low power consumption and less performance (but less power consumed) than drives optimised for performance. Sounds like their blue line.
> rated for 10°F hotter conditions than previous WD offerings
Now that is useful assuming the rating isn't artificially inflated somehow (or the other drives deflated) - the heat build up in little NAS boxes packed with drives can be rather considerable.
(I'm seeing a <5 year MTBF on greens.)
All storage vendors sell NAS specific hard drives. Typically called 'enterprise SATA' or 'enterprise SAS'. They have similar enhancements as this, but they work with the storage vendor to tune the firmware in the controller to the expected workload pattern (vs. a general DAS workload)
I'd not heard of it before, and a quick poke at the internet doesn't really show anything beyond a move to 4k sectors (and therefore presumably less efficient storage for lots of small files).
Is there something more I should know about? (in the market for a new home storage box soonish)
The translation process is more complicated when writing data that is either not a multiple of 4K or not aligned to a 4K boundary. In these instances, the hard drive must read the entire 4,096-byte sector containing the targeted data into internal memory, integrate the new data into the previously existing data and then rewrite the entire 4,096-byte sector onto the disk media. This operation, known as read-modify-write (RMW), can require additional revolution of the magnetic disks, resulting in a perceptible performance impact to the system user
Most of the OSes correctly align the advanced format sectors.