Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD 6 TB Review
by Ganesh T S on December 10, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Storage
- Seagate
- HDDs
- Enterprise
Concluding Remarks
The Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD is the latest addition to our 6 TB drives evaluation set. We have taken a look at how it compares against the other three 6 TB drives that have been evaluated before, but it is hard to recommend any particular one as the clear cut choice unless the particular application is known. The interesting aspect here is that none of the four drives have overlapping use-cases.
For home consumers who are interested in stashing their media collection / smartphone-captured photos and videos and expect only four or five clients to simultaneously access the NAS, the lower power consumption as well as the price of the WD Red 6 TB is hard to ignore. The HGST Ultrastar He6 is based on upcoming technological advancements, and hence, carries a premium. However, the TCO aspect turns out to be in its favour, particularly when multiple drives running 24x7 are needed. It offers the best balance of power consumption, price and performance. Users looking for absolute performance and those who need multiple iSCSI LUNs for virtual machines and other such applications in an enterprise environment are best served by the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4. However, if the equivalent performance is desired in a 4 - 16-bay NAS enclosure, the initial cost advantages provided by the Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD is hard to ignore. Both drives use a larger cache and the positive effect on performance can be seen in a number of workloads.
The 4 TB variant of the Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD seems to be priced around $236 and the 6 TB variant around $420. These prices don't have DRS included. The 4 TB variant costs the same as the equivalent WD Red Pro, but comes with extra cache capacity. This makes it perform better in a number of workloads, making it easier to recommend. The 6 TB variant really doesn't have any competitor in its price-to-performance ratio range. While the WD Red retails for less than $300, the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 retails north of $500. At the $420 price point, the Enterprise NAS HDD strikes a nice balance.
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cm2187 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
+1MikeMurphy - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Exactly.tocker - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
We could place bets. I'm going for a 40% failure rate inside of 3 years.Thats probably being generous.
Laststop311 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliabil...Hitachi has the lowest failure rate in a massively huge deployment of HDD's in a cloud storage facility. Gives you a pretty good idea just how amazing they are.
ddriver - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
Yeah, but that's not a given, remember back in the days where those same deskstar disks were called deathstar cuz they were dropping down life flies?It would be nice of more cloud storage provides post their stats so that regular people know what to buy.
Zap - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
What RPM are these drives? I know manufacturers like to obfuscate this information, but as a consumer I'd like to know.wavetrex - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
That raw read/write speed is typical for 1TB platters on a 7200rpm drive.My guess is that speed is the comfort zone for these drives, and they probably spin down to 5400 when idling to reduce power consumption
MrSpadge - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
No matter what WD likes to tell you with "IntelliPower" etc. drives do not normally run at different speeds. The mechanics, head aerodynamics / fly height and everything must be tailored to a specific spindle speed. Changing it on the fly has so far been unfeasible and wouldn't be much quicker than simply spinning down at idle, yet provide a only a small fraction of the power savings.hlmcompany - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
IntelliPower and WD don't say that the drive changes speed during operation. An IntelliPower drive is a fixed speed, but set to meet certain power requirements. Because of this not all IntelliPower drives are at the same spindle speed.http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/36...
Navvie - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
When 'IntelliPower' was first introduced WD were very secretive about exactly what it meant. Although there are now sources, their vague comments on exactly what IntelliPower is lead people to the conclusion that the drives were adjusting speed depending on demand.I believe the clever guys at SPCR were the first to determine the speed of IntelliPower drives by looking at the drives harmonics.