Performance with Hard Drives

The benchmarks processed in the previous section were also run with two WD Red 8TB hard drives in the unit. Running the robocopy benchmarks segment of the AnandTech DAS Suite with hard drives attached to the storage bridge gives us the following performance numbers. The graphs show that the storage bridge is able to sustain around 350 MBps for sequential workloads when modern-day high-capacity consumer hard drives are used.

Photos Read

 

The PCMark 8 storage bench is not particularly hard drive-friendly, with the performance numbers coming in at a fraction of what one obtains with SSDs.

Adobe Photoshop Light Read

CrystalDiskMark workloads show that the unit sometimes struggles with high queue-depth writes. We didn't observe this with SSDs, though. Given that we have not evaluated other storage bridges with the same hard drives yet, it is not clear where the problem lies. That said, the numbers we saw in our robocopy tests (around 300 MBps in RAID 0 and 150 MBps in RAID 1) are approximately matched in some of the results below.

Storage Bridge Benchmarks - CrystalDiskMark (with HDDs)

The active cooling ensures that the hard drives don't cross 45C even when subject to large amounts of traffic. There is no performance consistency issue.

Storage Enclosure Thermal Characteristics

Hard drives tend to consume more power compared to SSDs, and that is evident in the power numbers for the CrystalDiskMark workloads below. The unit idles at around 10.5 W, while the maximum power draw we observed was around 18.4 W.

Power Consumption - CrystalDiskMark Workloads

 

Performance with SSDs Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
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  • jabber - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    Timely! Been looking at getting one of these for a simple but speedy data dump.
  • Gothmoth - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    i have it for a few month now and it´s great fro teh price.

    thought there is one issue.
    they go to sleep to fast (after ~10 minutes).
    there is a FW update now that they never go to sleep.. not perfect either.

    but mine is only on when i backup to the two 6GB drives i put in... so no problem for me.
  • damianrobertjones - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    Typing on a phone can be tough.
  • Gothmoth - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    well i speak 5 languages more or less, du vollidiot. how many did you learn in your public school....?
  • wrkingclass_hero - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    1/2, we were busy learning about how we kicked Germany's ass twice.
  • stanleyipkiss - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    i suspect that was mostly thanks to the russians.
  • jabber - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    Yeah I hear quite a few other countries were involved but as usual some were later to the party than others...
  • Samus - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    Wow. This certainly took a left turn.
  • HomeworldFound - Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - link

    Don't forget the wall... the wall helped too.
  • Hurr Durr - Saturday, July 8, 2017 - link

    Your inability to embrace your own security will end you one glorious day.

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