WD Red 10TB review

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Pricing

At the time of writing, this drive can be bought for £292 in the UK and $324 in the US if sourced from Amazon. That equates to about 34GB per UK pound and 31GB per US dollar, about 10% cheaper than the Seagate IronWolf 10TB and almost the same price as the WD Gold 10TB.

There is, relatively speaking, a small amount of difference (1GB per dollar/pound) between this 10TB drive and its smaller WD80EFZX brother.

It undercuts the IronWolf Pro 10TB and WD Red Pro 10TB by around 20-25%. We’d mention other brands, but at this time only Western Digital and Seagate make drives of this capacity. And Seagate also offers a 12TB model for those with a serious capacity addiction.

Performance

We put this unit through our gamut of benchmarking tools, determined to find whatever weaknesses or strengths are hidden inside.
The quoted internal transfer speed is 210MB/s, as mentioned, and that’s almost exactly what CrystalDiskMark 6.0 reported: 210.9 MB/s reads, and 211.1MB/s writes.
The Atto disk benchmark was a little more conservative, with reads peaking at 202.5MB/s and writes at 204.5MB/s.
That makes the WD Red 10TB at least 10% slower than the Seagate IronWolf 10TB, mostly because that competitor is spinning at 7200 and not 5400RPM.
Unfortunately, both those tests tend to operate the drive as desktop storage, not testing how it would perform in a server or NAS box.

Final verdict
If you need a massive amount of array capacity and want to spend less on drive racks, you’ve got a stark choice between the WD Red 10TB and the Seagate IronWolf 10TB or 12TB options. If it comes down to price this drive wins, but the IronWolf disks are a little quicker. The choice is yours.