HGST Deskstar NAS 6 TB Review
by Ganesh T S on December 23, 2014 11:00 AM ESTConcluding Remarks
The HGST Deskstar NAS 6 TB has been evaluated for both NAS and DAS applications and the numbers put up for comparison against other 6 TB drives targeting this market segment. As expected, there is no 'one size fits all' model in this area. The various hard drives in the comparison lot were launched targeting different markets and their resulting performance varies accordingly.
Thanks to the 7200 RPM speeds, the HGST Deskstar NAS does manage to acquit itself well in the overall performance category. Though it is not the absolute best, it performs admirably well in the random access patterns segment of the multi-client evaluation.
The HGST Deskstar NAS doesn't deliver the lowest power consumption. Those were recorded, as expected, with the 5400 RPM WD Red and the HelioSeal-technology based HGST Ultrastar He6. However, the Deskstar NAS manages to almost win the efficiency category - thanks to the great balance between speed and power consumption.
In terms of pricing, the HGST Deskstar NAS wins comfortably. It is, by far, the most price effective 7200 rpm 6 TB drive in this market segment. At $300, the Deskstar NAS is beaten in price only by the 5400 RPM WD Red, which currently retails for around $270.
There are plenty of options for NAS users looking to stock up their NAS units with high capacity drives. 6 TB drives represent the current bleeding edge, and consumers need to make sure that their NAS is compatible with the chosen drive. One of the unfortunate aspects with the 6 TB Deskstar NAS was that one of the four drives that we were sampled was consistently discarded with a 'Bad HDD I/O Access History' by our QNAP testbed. This was triggered by a sense key error at the beginning of the initialization process (similar to what we saw for the WD Red 6 TB version). The 'defective' drive, however, managed to pass extended S.M.A.R.T tests on our DAS testbed. We are chalking this down to compatibility problems for the QNAP testbed with these new drives.
4 TB drives offer an alternative to the potential risk in going the new technology route with 6 TB drives for cautious buyers. With the right data in hand, it's easy enough to find the best fit by taking into consideration the expected workload and desired price points.The overall verdict is that the 6 TB HGST Deskstar NAS is a cost-effective solution for SOHO / power user scenarios where storage density is of primary importance. One just needs to make sure that their NAS is compatible with the 6 TB variant before going ahead with the purchase.
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Laststop311 - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link
Price/reliability/performance I think this is the best series of drives to purchase.akula2 - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link
You're absolutely correct. I own many Hitachi drives compared to WD and Seagate models.realwarder - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
I purchased two of these and put them in a Dell server as RAID drives. It was curious to read about the Qnap IO error as the drives failed to operate correctly in the server to start with - when on SATA channel 2/3 they always got an IO error during the boot which caused Windows Storage Spaces to reject the drives. On moving to channel 0/1 they show no I/O error at boot and work fine.Once working, they appear ok if not a little noisy. Run 4 degrees warmer than the boot drive too.
Only time will tell how they work out, but it's a lot of fast space which is what I was after - just look a lot of pain to get working due to the IO error causing the drive rejection.
StevieBee - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
Some advice please folks.. I have 2x8 bay synology drives ( 1815+) which i use for SOHO file backup and some media on a very small network of 3 users. At the moment i have 5 3TB WD reds in each and i want to add another 3 drives to each.My question is what are the best drives to add to the array? Reliability is more an issue than cost.
I was at first thinking about WD red Pro, but i am worried that the higher speed than my existing reds would cause a problem...Will it?
The other alternative would be to make one unit all the new deckstars with the higher speed, and then use the old WD reds to increase the other unit.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Merry Christmas
Steve
intiims - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
Great review from a great site. Nice Products Spec tables, very usefull and easy to understand.Guspaz: I think little and fast SDD drives are much better than big and slow, by the way, who can fill up 8TB ? I have never ever got more than 1TB. Even with a lot of movies and photos..
I found i nice site witth great reviews:
http://hddex.blogspot.com/
akula2 - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link
@However, the HGST Deskstar NAS drives have a 7200 RPM rating and the 5 / 6 TB variants come with 128 MB of DRAM cache. This is expected to make them perform closer to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 and Enterprise NAS HDD drives.Ganesh, that's a wrong comparison. Deskstar HDDs are targeted at Consumer or SOHO or even SMB segment. Why? Because it gets quite easy to go for RAID by adding a few HDDs in the Cases. Rest is all known.
If folks (like me) looking for Enterprise-grade drives, go for Hitachi's SAS 12 GB/s HDDs to get very high performance and ultra reliability. One can even choose SATA III HDD drives too. Most important is to know when to use those models. E.g.,
a) Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 SAS 12Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
b) Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 SATA 6Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
c) Hitachi Deskstar NAS SATA 6Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
Those three drives may look more or less same, but they aren't!