Today I’m taking another look at Western Digital’s WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ enterprise drives. I reviewed a single WD4000FYYZ in our Western Digital 4 TB roundup, and Western Digital was kind enough to provide us with some more drives to put through their paces.
The WD RE 4 TB FYYZ was the highest performing drive in our earlier roundup, and as an enterprise drive, it’s rated for double the load/unload cycles of the consumer drives. As such, these drives are optimized for RAID arrays.
The specifications of the drive are below:
- Interface – SATA 6.0Gb/s
- Capacity – 4TB
- RPM – 7200 RPM
- Cache – 64MB
- Load/Unload Cycles – 600,000
I’ll start off with the basic configuration, a single FYYZ drive.
In AIDA64, the single drive has a top linear read of 171.0 MB/s, a random read of 148.8 MB/s, and a buffered read of 345.2 MB/s. It has an average read access of 12.19 ms.
In CrystalDiskMark, the single drive provided a sequential read of 176.6 MB/s and a sequential write of 171.8 MB/s.
We had an issue with AIDA64 and the average read access times. For some reason they were coming out as 0.00 ms for the RAID 0 and 1 arrays, which is incorrect. The AIDA64 screenshots below still include the average read access, but any 0.00 ms times should be ignored
Moving on to two of the 4 TB FYYZ drives in RAID 1, a mirrored array, however, an NTFS RAID 1 array won’t provide any speed benefits.
In AIDA64, the two drive RAID 1 array has a top linear read of 173.6 MB/s, a random read of 130.7 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7278.0 MB/s.
In CrystalDiskMark, the two drive WD RE 4 TB RAID 1 array provided a sequential read of 176.5 MB/s and a sequential write of 166.8 MB/s.
Next up are the two WD RE 4 TB drives in RAID 0, a striped array, meaning performance should almost double.
In AIDA64, the two drive RAID 0 array has a top linear read of 339.3 MB/s, a random read of 289.1 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7359.2 MB/s.
In CrystalDiskMark, the two drive RAID 0 array provided a sequential read of 338.3 MB/s and a sequential write of 334.1 MB/s.
Now we get to the behemoth four 4 TB FYYZ drives in RAID 0, for an array 16 TB in size. The performance should be impressive.
In AIDA64, the four drive RAID 0 array has a top linear read of 713.5 MB/s, a random read of 559.7 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7440.5 MB/s.
In CrystalDiskMark, the four drive RAID 0 array provided a sequential read of 657.1 MB/s and a sequential write of 642.6 MB/s.
These figures are better than any consumer-grade SSD currently on the market, and certainly this array provides a much larger capacity.
We also tested four WD RE 4 TB drives in RAID 10. RAID 10 is the same as RAID 1 + 0, meaning that two pairs of drives are striped, and those pairs are mirrored. This array should yield similar performance to the two drive RAID 0 array, however, note the disclaimer below.
Disclaimer: It should be noted that the RAID 10 benchmarks were done via SATA 2.0 (3 Gbps) on an Intel X79 chipset, whereas the rest of the benchmarks in this review were done via SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps) on an AMD 990FX chipset. This will likely have some effect on the performance of the drives.
In AIDA64, the four drive RAID 10 array has a top linear read of 327.9 MB/s, a random read of 265.4 MB/s, and a buffered read of 6902.5 MB/s. It has an average read access of 11.92 ms.
In CrystalDiskMark, the four drive RAID 10 array provided a sequential read of 336.0 MB/s and a sequential write of 322.5 MB/s.
The drives themselves are very impressive, and scale well in RAID configurations. The WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ currently retails for $300. While this might be a bit too pricey for the average consumer, prosumers and businesses interested in drive performance and guaranteed durability should definitely consider the WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ.
