Western Digital 1TB RE3
The Western Digital RE3 is a top performer, an enterprise-class drive, performing well singly or in a striped RAID. It was a top performer in Photoshop tests.
When seeking, it is noticeably louder than Seagate 1TB ES.2, but it’s actually nice auditory feedback to know the drive is hard at work.
Noisy behavior at idle after heavy access
The RE3 has a peculiar characteristic: after some period of heavy access followed by idling, it enters some kind of noisy behavior (no data is being transferred to/from the Mac). It might do this for 30 seconds or more, then it settles down to its normal quiet self. Whether this is recalibration or self testing is unclear. A reader reports the same for the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.
Fill-volume, Mac Pro 4-drive stripe PERMALINK
The graph below shows performance across the volume as it was filled to capacity with 1000 equal-sized files, written 32MB at a time (this test takes over 6.18 hours to read and write the 3.6TB volume). See Why you need more space than you need to understand the performance gradient across the drive.
This is a 4-drive stripe using the Sonnet Tempo E4P with 4 eSATA cables to a FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4. We see near-perfect scalability over a single drive, and outstanding consistency (minimal variance) in speed at any position on the drives. See similar results from the Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000.E Saturn.E.
The graph makes it clear why you’d want a Photoshop scratch volume (partition) to be on the fast side of the drive—carve off 64GB or whatever you need there to get the 420MB/sec or so for maximum performance.
Red line is write, green line is read
Raw data
Test mule: MacPro quad-core 3.0GHz
SATA card: Sonnet E4P
Enclosure: FirmTek SeriTek 2eEN4
Driver: SoftRAID 3.6.7
Drive model: WD1002FBYS-01A6B0 v0.3.00c05 ("WD1002FBYS WD RE3")
Build date: 22-Sept-2008
# single drive
$ disktester run-area-test -i 5 -c 1M -t 1G wd1
===== Saturday, November 15, 2008 11:17:52 AM PT, volume "wd1" (931.2GB) =====
---------------- Write Details for "wd1" (1GB/1MB, 5 iterations) ---------------
Area (929.1GB) Slowest Median Fastest Average Range
0% 106.0 107.5 107.6 107.1 1.58
10% 104.9 106.1 106.2 105.8 1.30
20% 102.3 103.9 104.0 103.3 1.69
30% 100.1 101.8 101.9 101.4 1.77
40% 96.7 98.2 98.3 97.7 1.54
50% 93.1 94.5 94.6 94.0 1.50
60% 87.9 89.1 89.2 88.7 1.32
70% 81.3 82.3 82.5 81.9 1.23
80% 75.0 75.8 76.0 75.6 1.00
90% 66.6 66.8 66.9 66.8 0.31
100% 55.2 55.3 55.9 55.5 0.73
---------------- Read Details for "wd1" (1GB/1MB, 5 iterations) ----------------
Area (929.1GB) Slowest Median Fastest Average Range
0% 106.4 107.3 107.5 107.0 1.12
10% 104.7 105.8 106.0 105.5 1.27
20% 102.6 103.7 103.8 103.5 1.13
30% 100.4 101.6 101.8 101.2 1.33
40% 97.0 98.0 98.1 97.7 1.11
50% 93.7 94.3 94.4 94.2 0.74
60% 88.0 89.1 89.2 88.8 1.21
70% 81.4 82.3 82.4 82.0 1.03
80% 74.9 75.2 75.8 75.2 0.90
90% 66.0 66.2 66.5 66.2 0.44
100% 55.3 55.4 55.8 55.5 0.50
------------------ Averages for "wd1" (1GB/1MB, 5 iterations) ------------------
Area (929.1GB) Write MB/sec Read MB/sec
0% 107.1 107.0
10% 105.8 105.5
20% 103.3 103.5
30% 101.4 101.2
40% 97.7 97.7
50% 94.0 94.2
60% 88.7 88.8
70% 81.9 82.0
80% 75.6 75.2
90% 66.8 66.2
100% 55.5 55.5
Average write speed across the volume: 88.9MB/sec
Average read speed across the volume: 88.8MB/sec
Area tests — 4 drive stripe PERMALINK
Mac Pro 2.8GHz (2008), Sonnet Tempo E4P, FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4, OS X 10.5.6. Speed is identical with 1MB or 32MB transfers—excellent.
--- Averages for "WD-RE3" (4GB/1MB, 3 iterations) ---
Area (3.63TB) Write MB/sec Read MB/sec
0% 400 411
10% 416 416
20% 405 407
30% 397 397
40% 384 387
50% 369 368
60% 353 352
70% 321 321
80% 297 300
90% 260 263
100% 220 219
Average write speed across the volume: 347MB/sec
Average read speed across the volume: 349MB/sec
--- Averages for "WD-RE3" (4GB/32MB, 3 iterations) ---
Area (3.63TB) Write MB/sec Read MB/sec
0% 421 421
10% 417 417
20% 407 408
30% 398 399
40% 387 389
50% 369 371
60% 352 353
70% 323 321
80% 297 300
90% 260 264
100% 220 221
Average write speed across the volume: 350MB/sec
Average read speed across the volume: 351MB/sec
--- Averages for "WD-RE3" (4GB/start, 3 iterations) ---
Chunk Size Write MB/sec Read MB/sec
32K 138 147
64K 232 247
128K 387 409
256K 420 420
512K 419 418
1MB 419 420
2MB 420 420
4MB 422 419
8MB 418 420
16MB 419 421
32MB 419 421
