Western Digital Red Series Review: A Low Cost Validated NAS Specific HDD

CrystalDiskMark

Version and / or Patch Used: 3.0 Technical Preview

Developer Homepage: http://crystalmark.info

Product Homepage: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html

Download here: http://crystaldew.info/category/software/crystaldiskmark

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software that allows us to benchmark 4K and 4K queue depths with accuracy.

Key Features:-

* Sequential reads/writes

* Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes

* Text copy

* Change dialog design

* internationalization (i18n)

Note: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 Technical Preview was used for these tests since it offers the ability to measure native command queuing at 4 and 32.

CDM allows us to look at 4K and native command queuing performance. Mechanical drives don't offer the same rip roaring 4K performance as SSDs because their mechanical nature means IOPS performance is low. Reading and writing several small files back to back is the most difficult task you can ask of a spinner.

The Western Digital Red is the slowest 4K reader in the group, but that is to be expected since it also has the highest read latency. It does scale well when the commands are stacked, though.

The write performance is a bit better. The large 64MB of cache really helps in this area.