Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
As always, with our storage reviews, before we move on to the benchmark results, let us briefly discuss the physical attributes of this hard disk drive first. The Red WD140EFFX is your quintessential 3.5" hard drive from Western Digital; all you have at the top is bare metal with a dull silver finish and a large label placed across the middle. It weighs in at 1.52 lbs, making it lighter than the WD101EFAX 10TB at 1.65 lbs, but lighter than the WD120EFAX 12TB at 1.46 lbs. As a differentiating element between product lines, the top and bottom of the sticker is printed red in color, because, well, it is part of the Red series designed for network attached storage systems. The label also says WD Red at the bottom as opposed to WD Red Pro. On the label, you will also spot information like its 14TB drive capacity, SATA 6Gb/s interface, WD140EFFX model code, NASware 3.0 firmware, manufacturing date on October 5, 2019 for our particular unit, and that it is a product of Thailand. The Western Digital Red comes with a 3-year limited warranty compared to 5 years for the Pro model.
Turning the Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB around, and you will see a green printed circuit board that interfaces between its SATA 6Gb/s interface and the physical mechanical components. Mechanically, the Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB is a 7,200 RPM drive with eight high density platters inside. While Western Digital advertises this drive as a "5,400 RPM class" drive, this is misleading, because the spindle does indeed spin at 7,200 RPM according to our measurements. The drive is helium filled for reduced resistance, which means more platters can be stacked in the same amount of space along with reduced power consumption. With these high-density platters using conventional magnetic recording technology as opposed to performance-penalizing technologies like shingled magnetic recording, this should translate to great performance in our benchmarks. You will see 12.7TB in Windows. The rated power consumption is 6.5W under load, 3.0W idling, and 0.8W standby, which is very good. It beats the Seagate IronWolf ST14000VN0008 14TB and its 7.3W under load, 5.3W idle, and 0.8W standby rating. It is strange the WD Red 14TB has a slightly higher rated power consumption -- 0.3W extra -- under load compared to the WD Red Pro 14TB, but this further proves that this is not actually a 5,400 RPM drive no matter what the company wants you to think.
As far as electronic components are concerned, the Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB features an Avago drive controller. The motor is controlled by a Smooth L7232 chip. A Samsung K4B4G1646E-BYMA DDR3-1866 512MB IC acts as the cache for the drive.
But before we delve into the benchmarking, I would like to spend a little bit of time discussing the unique characteristics of the Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB NAS drive. What makes a NAS drive a NAS drive? From a hardware perspective, usually, it will feature lower consumption. Since file servers are designed to be turned on 24/7, reduced power consumption can make a significant difference on your power bill, especially if you have many drives. Reliability enhancements are also made with what Western Digital calls 3D Active Balance Plus, which refers to the disk being physically balanced properly to reduce excessive vibration and noise in a multi-drive configuration, such as your network attached storage system. Some network attached storage oriented models recommends no more than 5 drives per system, but the WD140EFFX will play nice even if you have up to 8 drives running concurrently. If you have a bigger NAS, you will need to go with a WD Red Pro, because the WD Red series does not have a multi-axis shock sensor enabled for measuring subtle shock events and compensating head position automatically. The Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB is also rated as having 1,000,000 hours MTBF.
As with all NAS drives, the Western Digital Red is TLER enabled. If a drive is not TLER enabled, it may be dropped out of a RAID array unexpectedly down the road. TLER stands for Time Limited Error Recovery, which is Western Digital's name for a feature that limits a hard drive's error recovery time to seven seconds. Seagate calls this ERC. According to Western Digital, desktop hard drives may enter deep recovery mode and could take up to two minutes to deal with a bad sector. During this time, the hard drive will not respond. Because of this, RAID controllers may mark the drive as unreliable, because it has failed to respond within a set period of time.
For small NAS environments, most people probably will not need hardcore enterprise grade drives, which are usually quite expensive. Drives like the Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB are specifically tested for compatibility, designed for reliability, and comes TLER enabled from the factory to ensure you will not experience related issues down the road. With a price closer to desktop than enterprise drives, the Western Digital Red series is simply a no-brainer if you are looking to fill up your file server.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.6GHz
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15S
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK
RAM: Patriot Viper 3 Low Profile PC3-17000 4x8GB
Graphics: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 4GB
Chassis: Fractal Design Define R6 Blackout TG
Storage: OCZ Vector 180 240GB; Crucial BX500 960GB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Sound: Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD
Optical Drive: LiteOn iHAS224-06 24X DVD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Western Digital Red WD140EFFX 14TB
- HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB
- Seagate BarraCuda Pro ST10000DM0004 10TB
- Seagate BarraCuda Pro ST10000DM0004 12TB
- Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V.5 ST8000NM0055 8TB
- Seagate IronWolf ST10000VN0004 10TB
- Seagate IronWolf ST12000VN0007 12TB
- Seagate IronWolf Pro ST12000NE0007 12TB
- Seagate IronWolf Pro ST14000NE0008 14TB
- Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB
- Seagate NAS HDD ST8000VN0002 8TB
- Western Digital Black WD6001FZWX 6TB
- Western Digital Red WD100EFAX 10TB
- Western Digital Red WD40EFRX 4TB
- Western Digital Red WD60EFRX 6TB
- Western Digital Red WD80EFZX 8TB
- Western Digital Red Pro WD141KFGX 14TB
- Western Digital Red Pro WD4001FFSX 4TB
- Western Digital Red Pro WD6001FFWX 6TB
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
