WD Red Pro 22TB HDD Review

Rating: 8.0.

WD recently refreshed their Gold, Red Pro and Purple product lines with new 22TB flagships. Aimed at NAS systems with up to 24 bays, the 22TB Red Pro features WD's latest technologies for CMR hard drives and the company's NASware 3.0 technology. Today we find out if this drive is worth its asking price of almost £600.

The 22TB Red Pro (WD221KFGX) uses WD's latest ten disk / twenty head platform, using 2.2TB discs. It has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm and a 512GB cache. WD quote a maximum sustained transfer rate of 265MB/s for the drive, which is 3MB/s slower than the quoted transfer rate of the previous flagship 20TB Red Pro drive.

The official power consumption figures for the drive are 6.8W when operating, 3.4W when idle and 1.2W when in standby and sleep modes, all three of which are slightly lower than the 6.9W, 3.8W and 1.6W respectively of the 20TB version of the Red Pro.

WD quote a workload figure of up to 300TB/year for the 22TB drive (the whole Red Pro range has the same workload figure) and back it with a 5-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 22TB.
• Spindle Speed: 7,200rpm.
• No. Of Platters: 10.
• No. Of Heads: 20.
• Cache: 512MB.
• Recording Method: ePMR (Energy-Assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording).
• Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III).
• Form Factor: 3.5in.
• Dimensions: 26.1 x 147 x 101.6mm.
• Drive Weight: 67g.
• Firmware Version: 83.00A83.

WD’s 22TB Red Pro is built on a standard 3.5in footprint but with a height of 26.1mm to accommodate the number of disks and actuators the drive uses. The drive has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm and there is an impressive 512MB of cache.

The drive uses 6th Gen WD HelioSeal Helium technology enabling the enclosure to hold ten 2.2TB aluminium discs along with twenty heads. The drive uses Energy-Assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (ePMR) and triple-stage actuator (TSA) technologies which help combat the threat of magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) which can be a real problem with today's ever-increasing areal density disks.

The 22TB Red Pro uses OptiNAND technology. OptiNAND technology is a flash-enhanced drive technology developed by WD that integrates an iNAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD), using 3D NAND, that sits on the hard drive PCB. It's the large chip on the far left of the PCB in the image above. The NAND isn't used to store user data as per the hybrid drives of the past, but instead is used to store the self-generated drive metadata instead of holding it on the disks themselves, freeing up more usable space.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real-world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Main system:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB DDR4-2400, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge Wifi motherboard.

Other drives
Seagate NAS 8TB
Seagate Exos X16 16TB
Seagate Exos X14 14TB
Seagate Exos X20 20TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB
Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 18TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB
Seagate IronWolf 10TB
Toshiba MG08ACA16TE 16TB
Toshiba N300 8TB
Toshiba NAS N300 14TB
Toshiba P300 3TB
Toshiba X300 6TB
WD Ultrastar DC HC560
WD Gold 12TB
WD Black 6TB
WD Black 4TB
WD Red Pro 20TB
WD Red 4TB
WD Red 8TB

Software:
ATOO Disk Benchmark.
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0.
IOMeter.

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results.

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V6 to test HDD drives.

In the CrystalDiskMark 4K QD32 T1 test, the 22TB WD Red posted the best read score to date for a mechanical hard drive of 3.658MB/s. Its write performance of 4.586MB/s is the fastest we've seen for a drive aimed at NAS use but it's way behind the four enterprise focussed drives we've tested; WD's Ultrastar DC HC560 and the three Seagate Exos drives.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

The official performance rating of the drive is up to 265MB/s. We couldn't hit that maximum figure with the ATTO benchmark but with read/write results of 259MB/s and 258MB/s respectively, we were certainly in the ballpark.

IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on a hard drive and solid-state drive technology.

We test with both random read and write 4K tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a hard drive, so our results will sometimes differ from the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable.

The 22TB Red Pro's 4K random write result of 810 IOPS sees it into the top 5 HDD drives we've tested to date. Its random read figure isn't quite as impressive though, at 722 IOPs.

In our throughput tests, the reads peaked at 266MB/s (8MB block) before falling back to finish the test run at 205.06MB/s. Writes peaked further back in the test run at the 512KB block mark at 265MB/s, confirming the official figure, before dropping back to finish the test run at 252.94MB/s.

The 22TB Red Pro's peak read result of 266MB/s confirms the official rating of 265MB/s before it starts to fall back against its competitors.

The WD Red Pro's performance appears to be a good deal more consistent than the reads.

The PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark has been designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices.

The Data Drive Benchmark uses 3 traces, running 3 passes with each trace.

Trace 1. Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, in to the target drive (write test).
Trace 2. Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
Trace 3. Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test)

The 22TB WD Red Pro handles the rigours of the PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark pretty well with an overall bandwidth figure of 64MB/s.

There's hardly any difference in the PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark results between the 22TB and 20TB versions of the WD Red Pro. The most significant improvement is the access time of the new 22TB drive.

To test the real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

The 22TB WD Red Pro produced very consistent performance in our Real Life file transfer tests when it came to handling the larger file sizes with an average write figure for the seven large file transfers of 245.28MB/s. The fastest write performance was the 5GB image at 277MB/s while the fastest read speed came from the AutoCAD File Folder transfer at 278MB/s. The slowest of the file transfers was the 50GB File Folder, full of small bity files, with writes at 165MB/s and reads at 134MB/s.

WD has recently added 22TB capacity drives to a number of their HDD product lines. One of these is the NAS-focused Red Pro range which officially supports NAS devices using up to 24 bays in size. The drive features a number of WD's current HDD technologies as well as more NAS-focused Red Pro features and uses WD's latest ten disk platform. The 22TB Red Pro has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm and comes with 512MB of cache.

Because the really dense 2.2TB discs that the drive uses can potentially cause tracking problems, WD has fitted the drive with a couple of technologies to help overcome any potential problems – Triple-stage actuator (TSA) and Energy-Assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (ePMR). TSA uses three pivot points in the actuator arm to more accurately position the head over the data track.

ePMR is a technology to overcome something called jitters. Jitters occur when the write current at the recording head is flipped from one direction to another, ePMR applies a constant electrical current to the main pole of the write head throughout the write process, producing a more consistent, preferred signal path that helps to reduce jitter. Reducing jitters allows for the reduction of space between bits written which in turn allows for greater areal densities and larger capacities.

The 22TB Red Pro uses OptiNAND technology. Developed by WD, OptiNAND is a flash-enhanced drive technology that integrates an iNAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD), using 3D NAND, that sits on the hard drive PCB. Unlike the hybrid drives of the past, the NAND isn't used to store user data but is used to store the self-generated drive metadata instead of holding it on the disks themselves, which frees up more usable disc space.

The new 22TB drives also have ArmourCache protection enabled. ArmourCache is a feature of WD's OptiNAND technology which cleverly combines the performance advantages but no data protection of Write Cache enabled (WCE) mode with the data protection of Write Cache disabled (WCD) mode.

To help the drive survive the hostile environment of larger NAS enclosures (the Red Pro line supports up to 24 bay units) the drive is equipped with a multi-axis shock sensor that detects subtle shocks and dynamic fly height technology which adjusts each read-write function to compensate and protect the data. 3D Active Balance Plus ensures that the drive is properly balanced which helps lessen vibration, something that can cause major problems in large multi-disk environments, which in turn reduces noise levels.

The other very important feature that the drive uses is NASware 3.0 Technology. NASware is firmware that improves the overall reliability and performance of the drive. It uses intelligent error recovery to prevent hard drives from being dropped off the RAID due to extended error recovery which reduces the downtime needed to rebuild the RAID array. It also optimises the power requirements of the drive which can help reduce power consumption and can help to improve drive performance and reliability by reducing the temperature of the drive.

WD quote a sustained transfer rate of 265MB/s for the 22TB Red Pro, which is very slightly slower than the 20TB version. When tested with the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite hit that maximum figure but, with test results of 259MB/s and 258MB/s for read and writes respectively, we could at least get very close.

The official workload rate for the 22TB Red Pro is 300TB/year, which is still the same figure for the whole Red Pro range from the 2TB model upwards. WD backs the Red Pro with a 5-year warranty.

We found the 22TB version of the Red Pro for £597.99 (inc VAT) on WD's online shop HERE.

Pros

• Overall performance.
• Drive technologies.
• NAS focussed features.

Cons

• All those data-saving technologies don't come cheap.

KitGuru says: WD's 22TB Red Pro drive combines WD's latest thinking on CMR hard drive technology including OptiNAND and ArmorCache with the long-standing NAS feature set of the Red Pro product line. The only real downside is that you have to pay a pretty penny for the privilege of owning one.

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