by Rob Williams on August 12, 2013 in Storage
The arena for NAS-targeted hard drives has just welcomed a second combatant: Seagate’s “NAS HDD”. Like WD’s Red series, NAS HDD is designed to work well with RAID controllers, has improved vibration-reduction, and additional power profiles. Unlike WD’s Red, NAS HDD has a 4TB model. Let’s see how that one stands up.
Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction – it’s been a staple of PC benchmarking for the better part of a decade. PCMark offers a range of tests to gauge every aspect of a computer’s performance and presents it in a simple final result. Thankfully, it also breaks down the overall score with individual subsystem scores (such as Memory, Storage, et cetera) in addition to providing individual test results.
As we’re not too concerned with the performance of the PC as a whole, for our testing here we deselect all default tests and run only the “Secondary Storage” suite, with the hard drive in question as the chosen drive. Tests in this suite range from the loading of applications, running a Windows Defender scan, editing video, gaming and more.
Because our WD Red drive is 2TB, and the Seagate NAS HDD is 4TB, comparing the two head-to-head is a little unfair. That said, Seagate’s offering does come out on top in all but two of the tests here, with a 4.6% improvement in the overall Storage Score.