Testing the WD Red SA500 NAS SSD
Now that Western Digital has entered the NAS Solid State Drive market with their dedicated Network Attached Storage SSD, the WD Red SA500 series, we are really starting to see a change in the way most mid-range users handle the data in their NAS. Hard drive and SSD manufacturers did not start this trend and in fact, SSD and hybrid HDD+SSD RAID use in NAS Drives has been becoming increasingly common in the last 3 years. Big brands like QNAP and Synology have been in the process of releasing NAS devices that feature dedicated SATA based HDD bays separate from SATA SSD Bays for a while and it has taken till 2019 for us to see the drive manufacturers release more NAS focused solid-state media. Much like when NAS hard drives were released for NAS servers because a drive designed for 24×7 use, more random Read/Write access and RAID ready was needed, Solid-state drives in NAS need to be used in a different way to those used for the OS of your PC or laptop. Ideally, an SSD for NAS should be designed as either for cache support (meaning the contents are going to be read, written, deleted and replaced more frequently) or for live 10/25/40Gbe access over the network, whilst cooperating with the HDD. Today I am starting my 3 part testing of the WD Red SA500 NAS SSD, to look into its architecture and just how it does what it does! This first test will revolve around using desktop PC tools. Yes, these are not perfect for NAS testing (that’s test 2 next week), but these are the tools that are the easiest to follow when testing a single SSD. But before we get to the test results, let’s take a look at the SA500 SSD itself in our teardown.
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Check out FREE NAS advice section on nascompares.com
Now that Western Digital has entered the NAS Solid State Drive market with their dedicated Network Attached Storage SSD, the WD Red SA500 series, we are really starting to see a change in the way most mid-range users handle the data in their NAS. Hard drive and SSD manufacturers did not start this trend and in fact, SSD and hybrid HDD+SSD RAID use in NAS Drives has been becoming increasingly common in the last 3 years. Big brands like QNAP and Synology have been in the process of releasing NAS devices that feature dedicated SATA based HDD bays separate from SATA SSD Bays for a while and it has taken till 2019 for us to see the drive manufacturers release more NAS focused solid-state media. Much like when NAS hard drives were released for NAS servers because a drive designed for 24×7 use, more random Read/Write access and RAID ready was needed, Solid-state drives in NAS need to be used in a different way to those used for the OS of your PC or laptop. Ideally, an SSD for NAS should be designed as either for cache support (meaning the contents are going to be read, written, deleted and replaced more frequently) or for live 10/25/40Gbe access over the network, whilst cooperating with the HDD. Today I am starting my 3 part testing of the WD Red SA500 NAS SSD, to look into its architecture and just how it does what it does! This first test will revolve around using desktop PC tools. Yes, these are not perfect for NAS testing (that’s test 2 next week), but these are the tools that are the easiest to follow when testing a single SSD. But before we get to the test results, let’s take a look at the SA500 SSD itself in our teardown.
Continue reading...
- - -
Check out FREE NAS advice section on nascompares.com