Western Digital WD Red SA500 NAS SSD 1 TB

[W1zzard]

Western Digital's WD Red SA500 is a solid-state-disk optimized for NAS usage, either as cache drive or for primary storage. With a price of $140 for 1 TB, the SSD is priced more aggressively than Seagate's IronWolf 110 NAS competitor, yet offers similar performance and still retains the five-year warranty.

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[bug]

I don't know, ignoring price per GB, if I were to build a SSD NAS, I'd go for NVMe drives. Get the smallest ITX board with a crapload of PCIe lanes, a riser card that can fit 4 NVMe "disks" and get a NAS that will almost fit in your palm. And get much faster sequential speeds which is what NAS is usually about.

 

[Quitessa]

I would be more worried about the 600TB written, 600 total drive writes for a cache drive?

 

[bug]

I would be more worried about the 600TB written, 600 total drive writes for a cache drive?

That looks pretty standard for SSDs. Plus, NAS boxes are read more often than they are written (e.g. write a movie once, watch it hundreds of times).

 

[Quitessa]

I suppose, still while 300GB/day isn't Too terrible that's and the drive is likely to manage to survive as much as 3* more than that from techreports ssd endurance experiment with the Samsung 840.

 

[ebivan]

I just bought a used (6tb written so far) 2tb Samsung 850 Pro for BAS based unpacking and caching, I guess it will be as good as the WD Red but is much much more affordable

 

[bug]

I just bought a used (6tb written so far) 2tb Samsung 850 Pro for BAS based unpacking and caching, I guess it will be as good as the WD Red but is much much more affordable

It would be really, really weird if a used drive wasn't more affordable than a new one, wouldn't it?

 

[ebivan]

Thats right, but even a new Samsung Evo 860 1tb for 100€ would do I suppose.

 

[bug]

Thats right, but even a new Samsung Evo 860 1tb for 100€ would do I suppose.

Well yes, it's right there in the cons column: it's not the cheapest 1TB drive around. Even if it was (way) cheaper, it's still too small for a NAS imho.

 

[newtekie1]

I don't know, ignoring price per GB, if I were to build a SSD NAS, I'd go for NVMe drives. Get the smallest ITX board with a crapload of PCIe lanes, a riser card that can fit 4 NVMe "disks" and get a NAS that will almost fit in your palm. And get much faster sequential speeds which is what NAS is usually about.

And then you'd attach it to a gigabit network making all that extra speed totally useless.

 

[Baum]

I just bought a used (6tb written so far) 2tb Samsung 850 Pro for BAS based unpacking and caching, I guess it will be as good as the WD Red but is much much more affordable

2tb Samsung 850 Pro goes for 275€+++ more like 300€ ++

i take the cheap sandisk 1tb sata ssd's for 139€ any day and do hdd backup of my nas or cloud based service much more performance/price ratio even now when the are 189€ for 1Tb on amazon after the blackfriday or christmas sales

 

[bug]

And then you'd attach it to a gigabit network making all that extra speed totally useless.

10Gbps is not unheard of these days. And you can connect both over Ethernet and WiFi at the same time. But generally, yes it's not easy to get the NVMe bandwidth out of a box. But this still leaves you with the huge space savings.

 

[Deleted member 158293]

I'd probably take the Seagate SSD drive over this one if more than just a handful of people are using the NAS. That write speed issue will add up with multiple users on an active link aggregated or 10GB connected NAS. For low volume (non-database) home use I don't see any particular issue.

Have to say I do like SSDs & NVMEs as tiered NAS cache drives, they make the units really work smoothly.

 

[Chrispy_]

$580 for the 4TB is a bit of a sore spot since the Samsung 860 drives are $460 and are guaranteed for 1449TB/written which is way more than these reds, whilst offering tangibly better performance for the home/prosumer NAS enclosure. If you're buying 4 or eight of these that's a $500 saving to pick up a faster drive with higher endurance. What's the point in looking at the WD Reds?

I guess if this were an enterprise product where sustained writes are a huge selling point, it might make more sense, but AFAIK NAS drives aren't the market for enormous sustained writes. Especially since NAS storage with more than 1GbE of bandwidth tend to be multi-bay devices and therefore the limitations of raw QLC NAND writes are masked by striping them across multiple drives - strengthening the Samsung's market position further still....

 

[Makaveli]

And then you'd attach it to a gigabit network making all that extra speed totally useless.

lol I was gonna say I hope he has a 10Gbps LAN for all of this.

 

[newtekie1]

10Gbps is not unheard of these days. And you can connect both over Ethernet and WiFi at the same time. But generally, yes it's not easy to get the NVMe bandwidth out of a box. But this still leaves you with the huge space savings.

Except the space saving isn't really that great. Yeah, an ITX motherboard is small, but those 4xNVMe riser cards aren't. They also need half way decent airflow. You're probably looking at a case that would end up being about the same size as a dedicated 4-bay NAS.

Of course, you'd also have the trouble of finding an mITX motherboard with built in 10Gb/s, because you can't add one. Good luck with that.

 

[lexluthermiester]

This is an example of a TLC drive done right. Not perfect performance but seeming steady and solid.

 

[newtekie1]

This is an example of a TLC drive done right. Not perfect performance but seeming steady and solid.

The recent TLC reviews have all had good steady write performance. I don't know if it is that the TLC has advanced enough, or maybe it's the controllers that have advanced, or maybe it's just the manufacturers have finally figured it out. Or maybe it's a combination of all 3. I think Seagate has it masters the best. That Ironwolf write graph looks pretty darn perfect on the Ironwolf, a steady 500MB/s across the whole drive.

I mean, we've got TLC SATA drives that are outperforming some TLC NVMe drives when it comes to write intensive use.

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

The easiest way to get around the slow transfers of a NAS SSD is to use USB 3.0 to plug in a SSD if you don't want to have to spend the money to replace the HDD.

You store on the SSD just the most important files you want access to. You'll be limited to USB 3.0 speeds, but at least the access time will exceed the HDD seek times.

 

[Makaveli]

The easiest way to get around the slow transfers of a NAS SSD is to use USB 3.0 to plug in a SSD if you don't want to have to spend the money to replace the HDD.

I had to read this twice as that sentence is confusing.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I had to read this twice as that sentence is confusing.

He does not seem to realize that using the USB3.0 bus solves nothing as the SATA SSD will still need to transfer data through a SATA to USB controller, which is still limited to SATA3 speeds before it reaches the USB3.0 bus..

 

[mak1skav]

Performance is quite good but the price isn't so though. Spending only few $$ more can get you the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB from the same performance charts that smokes it.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Spending only few $$ more can get you the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB from the same performance charts that smokes it.

Ah but the Adata drive doesn't have a 5year drive replacement warranty... Absolute performance isn't always the most important feature. Additionally, the Adata drive is an M.2 NVME drive which not everyone can use. Everyone can use SATA.

 

[bug]

Except the space saving isn't really that great. Yeah, an ITX motherboard is small, but those 4xNVMe riser cards aren't. They also need half way decent airflow. You're probably looking at a case that would end up being about the same size as a dedicated 4-bay NAS.

Of course, you'd also have the trouble of finding an mITX motherboard with built in 10Gb/s, because you can't add one. Good luck with that.

One mobo, two PCIe cards (one for SSDs and one for network), blow air from front to rear and you're set. I think the hardest part would be find a case that's not built for HTPC, if you can keep outside connectors to a minimum, you could end up with something quite small.
But again, this is all wishful thinking, the price per GB seriously limits SSD adoption in a NAS today.

 

[cucker tarlson]

It would be really, really weird if a used drive wasn't more affordable than a new one, wouldn't it?

given the specs of the red,no.