WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Drive Review

With the recent release of WD’s long-awaited 4TB ‘Red’ model, folks looking to fill their networked-storage box up with the largest density drives now find themselves with two options to ponder. Join us as we establish which drive comes out the victor – WD’s Red or Seagate’s NAS HDD – after their head-to-head battle.

Despite being first to market with a NAS-targeted hard drive, WD has proven itself to be the late one on offering a 4TB model – Seagate beat it to the punch just a couple of months earlier. It was a little baffling that WD didn’t offer the top-density model sooner, but there’s nothing like a little competitive prodding to get the ball rolling, right?

When Seagate released its NAS HDD series a couple of months ago, it had a verbatim list of goals against WD’s Red NAS line. Typical error correction is stripped in order to let a RAID controller do its thing, and it’s also designed with a couple of other properties perfect for NAS use.

If you’re in the market for drives to fill a NAS up with, it’s highly encouraged to choose a model that’s designed with NAS use in mind, such as WD’s Red. Likewise, it’s not recommended to use such drives in the desktop, although you can probably get by just fine. It’s worth bearing in mind though that the things companies like WD or Seagate strip out of the NAS models were designed for desktop use – enough said.

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