Seagate NAS HDD 4TB Review

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.

Considering the fact that network-attached storage (NAS) use is growing at an alarming rate, it didn’t surprise us much last summer when WD released its NAS-bound “Red” series, but it did make us question, “what took so long?”

A NAS-specific hard drive might seem like a gimmick at first, but there are important differences over other low-powered drives that makes them the better and safer solution.

The most important tweak in NAS drives is the reduction of the timeout value for error correction. Low-power drives, such as WD’s Green, for example, are not designed to work with RAID controllers, which are what handles the error-correction in NAS solutions. Thus, if a hard drive and RAID controller are battling each other for error-correction, one can cancel out the other, and the drive can potentially drop from the RAID – that’s the beginning to a bad day.

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