Page 11 - Conclusion
While confusing someone to be a Hong Kong grandma may be hard to forgive as a trivial mistake, it is hard to blame anyone who glanced over the difference between the Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB and Red Pro WD141KFGX 14TB in the name. While both are massive 14TB drives with a massive 512MB cache from the NAS-oriented WD Red lineup, they are actually quite different under the hood. The Pro variant is a 7,200 RPM HDD with a 5-year warranty optimized for large servers, while the vanilla version we are looking at today is designed to be slower with a 3-year warranty designed for smaller systems. You may think the difference in performance between the two is non-trivial now that we know the specifications, but here is yet another plot twist: The performance between the two are actually not as big as you think. Obviously, the WD Red Pro WD141KFGX 14TB has a much higher linear read and write speed thanks to how fast it spins, but once some sort of workload is applied to the drives, the gap narrows considerably. In fact, the WD Red WD140EFFX 14TB actually performed better in some tests. The WD Red is actually not more power efficient than the 7,200 RPM WD Red Pro, because this drive is actually a 7,200 RPM drive contrary to what they want you to think. For about $510 at press time, the Red 14TB is no doubt a better deal than the Red Pro 14TB at $550, but as I have said in the WD141KFGX review, Western Digital's biggest problem is Seagate. The IronWolf Pro ST14000NE0008 14TB has significantly better performance and warranty compared to either WD Red drives in pretty much every measurable metric and can be had for $480 at press time. The IronWolf ST14000VN0008 14TB, non-Pro if you missed it in the name and the WD140EFFX's direct competitor, is only $440 at press time. The WD140EFFX is a decent drive that comes from a brand of proven reliability, so the WD's challenge remains not to be the hardware -- but the price tag.
Western Digital provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB is a super capacity hard drive designed for network attached storage systems with the performance to go, but a more attractive price tag will make it more competitive.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 7.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. NAS Performance, Power Consumption
11. Conclusion
