Tong Family

Been buying a ton of 4TB drives lately, so good to see the reviews, the performance is about the same, but the big issue has been reliability. The new units are jusst out with Seagate HDD launched June 2013 and this is what I’ve been using (despite many notes in Newegg about reliability). Western Digital yesterday announced their secoond version of WD Red yesterday (I just bought some of the older ones, ugh, last week :-().

• Western Digital Red 4 TB [ WDC WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 ]
• Seagate 4 TB NAS HDD [ ST4000VN000-1H4168 ]
• Western Digital Se 4 TB [ WDC WD4000F9YZ-09N20L0 ]
• Western Digital Re 4 TB [ WDC WD4000FYYZ-01UL1B0 ]

For more enterprise applications or reliablity WD Re (for heavy workloads) in September 2012, while WD Se (for high capacity) was introduced at May 2013.

While the Seagate NAS HDD unit manages to win most of the performance tests, it comes at the cost of an increase in power consumption. 1-5 bay NAS system users looking for top performance at lower price points might do well to take a look at the Seagate NAS HDD. On the other hand, if a cool-running system is the need of the hour and performance is not a major concern, the WD Red makes an excellent choice. We have also been very impressed with WD’s response to various user complaints about the first generation Red drives. Seagate’s track record with the NAS HDD is pretty small since the drives started shipping just a couple of months ago. As the drives get more widespread, compatibility issues (if any) get resolved and more user field reports become public.
Sometimes, the expected workloads become too heavy (> 150 TB/yr) for the consumer NAS drives to handle. Under those circumstances, the WD Se and WD Re are excellent choices. The WD Se can handle up to 180 TB/yr and the WD Re can go up to 550 TB/yr. Thanks to their higher rotational speed (7200 rpm), the enterprise grade drives have much better performance on the whole. We have also been using the WD Re drives for evaluation of various NAS systems. The disks have gone through countless rebuilds for test purposes and are still going strong. We have no qualms in standing behind the WD Re drives for very heavy NAS workloads.
AnandTech | Battle of the 4 TB NAS Drives: WD Red and Seagate NAS HDD Face-Off