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6 Terabyte Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green and Seagate Enterprise 6TB

Posted by samzenpus on from the best-of-the-best dept.

MojoKid writes The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Since most of us still need a hard drive for bulk storage, the question naturally becomes, "how big of a drive do you need?" For a while, 4TB drives were the top end of what was available in the market but recently Seagate, HGST, and Western Digital announced breakthroughs in areal density and other technologies, that enabled the advent of the 6 Terabyte hard drive. This round-up looks at three offerings in the market currently, with a WD Red 6TB drive, WD Green and a Seagate 6TB Enterprise class model. Though the WD drives only sport a 5400RPM spindle speed, due to their increased areal density of 1TB platters, they're still able to put up respectable performance. Though the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB (also known as the Constellation ES series) drive offers the best performance at 7200 RPM, it comes at nearly a $200 price premium. Still, at anywhere from .04 to .07 per GiB, you can't beat the bulk storage value of these new high capacity 6TB HDDs.

2 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who cares about rotational speed these days? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    OK, I have a 5TB RAID array 50% full of music and a 3TB (soon to be upgraded to 4) full of videos.

    These drives run quite fast enough for me to stream their contents - why would I want to cache them onto an SSD?

    So I'm raising my hand but not sheepishly.

  2. Re:"NAS" hard drives? by hawguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've seen in general, three lines of HDDs. Basic desktop/laptop drives, premium desktop/laptop, and enterprise grade drives which are designed to all wind up at the same firmware level to minimize issues when in RAID controllers.

    However, a "NAS" hard drive? Is this something a step down from enterprise drives, but designed for a device like a Drobo, or some other solution that really doesn't care about background drives, uses RAID 5 or 6, and expects drives to blow out over time?

    Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?

    I always thought that the NAS/RAID drives allowed Time Limited Error Recovery to be specified, which would prevent RAID controllers from interpreting a long error recovery interval as a drive timeout and erroring out that drive and removing it from the array. The NAS and Enterprise drives do allow this option to be set.