WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Drive Review

One of the best-known storage benchmarking tools is HD Tune, as it’s easy to run, covers a wide-range of testing scenarios, and can do other things such as test for errors, provides SMART information and so forth. For our testing with the program, we run the default benchmark which gives us a minimum, average and maximum speeds along with an access time result, and also the Random Access test, which gives us IOPS information.

Throughput-wise, Seagate’s drive comes ahead of WD’s by about 20% (~110MB/s versus 130MB/s), while WD’s whittles-down the access times just a wee bit. Note that because the throughput charts are arranged based on the minimum, WD’s drive placed at the bottom. More on this on the final page.

For the most part, it’s hard to declare either Seagate’s or WD’s NAS drives as the definitive winner, but WD’s does seem to get the nod overall – namely thanks to its much higher write IOPS performance at 4K and 64K.