By: Jonathan Kwan
February 17, 2017
As time progresses, sometimes I wonder how far we have come. For me personally, I still remember when I was still in high school, wondering what I should study in university just like it was yesterday. As I entered university for my degree in Electrical Engineering, I remember joking with my former colleague Devin Chollak on going into graduate studies after -- knowing full well the impossibility of that idea. Now that I am sitting in my office here at the University of Calgary, working towards my PhD in Electrical Engineering, sometimes it baffles me how I even got here in the first place. I think it was a combination of people who had more faith in me than I had in myself, along with more opportunities that were given to me than I really should deserve. Beyond that, there is really nothing to boast about. With the medium sized brown corrugated cardboard box sitting next to me right now, I wonder in the same way how we got here. Inside this brown corrugated cardboard box contains Western Digital's Red WD80EFZX 8TB hard drive. But we are not talking about how we have just one of them for testing. Actually, we have four of them -- yes, you read that right -- four 8TB hard drives for our review today. Tally up this trivial math question, we have a whopping 32TB of storage. What the heck is 32TB of storage? Can you imagine being able to buy all these for $1320 a decade ago? And how well will they perform? Well, the answer is in the box as we shuffle through the details.
Our review unit of the Western Digital Red WD80EFZX 8TB came in a medium sized, brown corrugated cardboard box from the company's American headquarters in Irvine, California. Using UPS Saver, everything arrived quickly to us here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada on a cold December afternoon. There is quite a bit of fragile and valuable content inside, and as always, the box appeared to be in excellent condition for our review today.
Inside the medium sized, brown corrugated cardboard box is a black polyethylene terephthalate shell with four hard drives clipped in between. Each Western Digital Red WD80EFZX 8TB unit is placed inside a sealed anti-static bag for additional protection. There is no retail packaging, but to be honest, I have never purchased a hard drive that is not in OEM packaging in the past, so this should be nothing new to most people. Sometimes I wonder if internal hard drives are actually sold with any retail packaging at all, other than the HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB I reviewed almost three years ago, haha.
Before we move on, let us take a look at the features and specifications of the Western Digital Red WD80EFZX 8TB, as obtained from the manufacturer's website:
Specifications
Model number: WD80EFZX
Interface: SATA 6 Gb/s
Formatted capacity: 8TB
Form factor: 3.5-inch
Advanced Format (AF): Yes
Native command queuing: Yes
RoHS compliant: Yes
Performance
Data transfer rate (max):
- Interface speed: 6 Gb/s
- Internal transfer rate: 178 MB/s
- Cache (MB): 128
Performance Class: 5400 RPM Class
Reliability/Data Integrity
Load/unload cycles: 600,000
Non-recoverable read errors per bits read: <1 in 10^14
MTBF (hours): 1,000,000
Limited warranty (years): 3
Power Management
12VDC ±10% (A, peak): 1.79
Average power requirements (W):
- Read/Write: 6.4
- Idle: 5.2
- Standby/Sleep: 0.7
Environmental Specifications
Temperature (°C)
- Operating: 0 to 65
- Non-operating: -40 to 70
Shock (Gs)
- Operating (2 ms, read/write): 30
- Operating (2 ms, read): 65
- Non-operating (2 ms): 250
Acoustics (dBA):
- Idle: 20
- Seek (average): 29
Physical Dimensions
Height (in./mm): 1.028/26.1
Length (in./mm): 5.787/147
Width (in./mm, ± .01 in.): 4/101.6
Weight (lb./kg, ± 10%): 1.43/0.65
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 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. NAS Performance, Power Consumption
11. Conclusion
