WD Red 6TB NAS Hard Drive Review

Whether your NAS has 1 or 8 bays, if your goal is to maximize the available storage space, you’ll want to turn your attention to WD’s Red – the only consumer-targeted NAS series that offers a 6TB option. At about $265, it’s not too hard on the wallet, and as we’ll see, it boasts some good performance, as well.

Considering the fact that WD announced its Red 6TB hard drive last summer, getting a review of it on the site has taken quite some time. In fact, now that we’ve entered 2015, I took a moment to look back and see when our last look at a bare drive was, and honestly, I was floored. Our last published hard drive review came in late 2013. Coincidentally, it was of WD’s Red 4TB,. I guess there’d be no better drive to follow that up with than the 6TB version, right?

So it’s been some time since the last hard drive review (we have had a number of external storage and NAS reviews, however), but there have been a couple of good changes made to our test suite since then. While the test PC itself remains the same, we’ve realized the err of our ways with using a platform equipped with too much RAM. In effect, more RAM = more caching, and that’s not good when the goal is to gauge accurate performance from the drive we’re testing.

Going forward, hard drives will be tested in the PC with just 4GB of RAM installed. That’s enough to allow Windows to run with lots of breathing room, but not enough to skew our test results – something helped by the fact that our smallest real-world test transfer is 10GB. None of this means that our older results are inaccurate, per se – it just means we feel more confident with our retested ones.

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