Western Digital is the only manufacturer with two lines NAS hard drives the Red and the Red Pro

After years of consolidation, there are only four companies that produce hard drives: Western Digital, HGST (part of Western Digital), Seagate and Toshiba. producing these parties three special drives for NAS devices. HGST and Seagate both have a line of NAS drives, while Western Digital even two.

HGST Deskstar the NAS offers, with a capacity of between 3 and 6 TB and a rotation speed of 7200 rpm. There is now a new revision, which is often referred to by retailers as v2, but sometimes not. These discs we have not tested and we therefore do not know whether they should represent an improvement.

In the NAS-models of Seagate, it is immediately obvious that it concerns NAS-disks: they are indeed referred to as NAS HDD. The speed of rotation of these disks is 5900 rpm (with the exception of the 8 TB-variant which is 7200 rpm), and they are available with a capacity of between 1 and 8 TB.

Western Digital is the only manufacturer with two lines NAS hard drives the Red and the Red Pro. The mainstream Red line consists of 5400rpm drives with capacities between 1 and 8 TB. Red Pro drives are designed for prosumers and a rotation speed of 7200 rpm. They would therefore have to be a lot faster. The company also offers two Red NAS hard drives of 2.5 inches with a capacity of 750 GB and 1 TB. However, these are more expensive and slower, so it makes little sense to use a 2,5inch disc into a PC or NAS. In this test we have NAS discs recorded with a capacity of 2 TB or more. Hard drives that are smaller than 2 TB in our view does not really make sense for a NAS.

Tested PC drives
In addition to these models, we take hard drives along intended for PCs. This is not a reflection of the market, such as the NAS models, because there are simply too many of them. Instead, we have chosen the models with the best price / quality ratio. One of them is special: namely Seagate Archive 8TB. It has additional storage in the same physical space as smaller hard drives with the new technology SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). It uses smaller data tracks which have the effect in a letter writing also must be re-written claimant data. The disadvantage is that the writing speed is lower and rises more wear when he described. The disc is moreover not designed for RAID applications such as NAS.


Archive Seagate HDD uses a new technology that allows for cheaper storage.
Test results NAS drives
We tested the eighteen drives in this article combined with the onboard SATA 6Gbps / s ports on a motherboard with the Intel Z77 chipset. Through a number of benchmarks, we have determined the performance and compared. The smallest NAS drive is a Western Digital Red 2TB and it's also the only NAS drive 2TB we tested. We can not compare him with 2TB models from other brands, but the performance is fine.

In terms of speed, noise and power he does no worse than the Red 3TB. However, the price per gigabyte is less favorable than that of the larger drives. There are three discs with a capacity of 3 TB: a Red Western Digital, Seagate and HGST Deskstar HDD NAS NAS. Seagate and WD average cost 123 and 127 euros respectively, while you pay extra for a tenner HGST (135 euros). Remarkably Seagate despite its lower rotation speed still faster than the HGST. Red is the slowest, but we find him the better choice. He may not be as fast as the Seagate, but more importantly he is still inaudible.

In 4TB drives we compare four models: Seagate, HGST, a Western Digital and Red and Red Pro. The WD Red Pro is the fastest, but the average price of 252 euro is quite high. Of the remaining drives Seagate performs best. He is slightly less quiet than the Red, but the difference is much smaller than the 3TB drives.

If we look at the drives 6TB we see more of the same: the WD Red Pro performs the best, followed by the HGST, with the Red and rear. Again, the Red Pro is the most expensive (average 319 euros), while the Red and HGST are similar priced (average, respectively 275 and 282 euros).

The HGST is faster, but because he is exceptionally noisy, our choice is still in the red. Finally 8TB drives, which there are only two on the market: the Western Digital and Seagate Red 8TB NAS 8TB HDD. The price is almost identical: the Seagate costs 369 euros, compared with 365 for the Red. The Seagate is a lot faster, but at the same time much less quiet in idle. Red performs in that area excellent: he is idle by far the quietest product in the test and therefore the recommendation.

Redactietip: WD Red
Especially with a consumer NAS makes the speed of the hard disk does not really matter, the speed is limited by the network. The WD Red drives are certainly not the fastest, but at the same time be the quietest and most energy-efficient. That's our opinion important properties and give the WD Red drives therefore Redactietip.

Test results PC drives
As stated above, we have also taken into account hard disks that are intended to be in a PC to be used. Currently only Seagate delivers desktop models with a capacity of 8 TB. We tested the Seagate Archive 8TB, the cheapest drive with this capacity. The disk is especially designed for price-conscious (long-term) storage of data and the write performance was not spectacular. We see in the benchmark results that the write speed is much lower than other drives, but that he has a good price per gigabyte. We have also chosen two models of 4 TB: Seagate 4TB Desktop HDD and Toshiba MD04ACA400 4TB. The similarly priced Toshiba to be slightly faster, but it appears to load quite a bit noisier. Finally, we have two Seagate drives with a capacity of 2 and 5 TB. Both discs have a good price per gigabyte and reasonable performance.

Conclusion
When comparing hard disks do you usually go directly to the performance. That has less effect on NAS drives. Not all NAS devices have an equally high throughput rate, for example because the processing power is different and in addition the speed is limited by the network connection. It's a good idea to take this into account when looking at the benchmark results: faster in benchmarks usually does not mean a hard drive into a NAS also will be faster.

Although the disks from Western Digital Red virtually anywhere out of the test and slowest, they are still interesting for a NAS by their price and silence. Seagate models perform better, but they are however much noisier that we would not recommend. WD Red Pro appears in each equation in which he appears to be the fastest, but is too expensive and produces too much noise. The HGST drives are unfortunately not quiet enough to recommend. We therefore give the WD Red series as a whole Redactietip. For hard drives for PCs, we have included in the accompanying table models with different capacities to offer a good price / quality ratio.

Again, all these conclusions hear the nuance that we can draw any firm conclusions about what actually the most important aspect of discs, namely life. It is therefore advisable to always make a backup of important data.