The Best NAS Drives of 2020 - 8 TB & 14 TB Roundup (WD Red, Red Pro, Seagate Ironwolf, Toshiba N300)

and now for something completely different hard drives now even though i'm a complete ssd addict and every system i own has only ssd storage when you start doing 4k videos and the amount of data that you need to store and that you need to save exceeds the capacity of your already large ssds you have to look into some other solutions which are ultimately hard drives now i already have some eight terabyte drives in my nas but i really wanted to upgrade to some 14 terabyte ones and since i was already doing some research to figure out which ones should i get for myself it was only natural to make a video about it as well now the very easy part here is that there aren't that many brands that you can actually choose from making a hard drive requires some pretty complex work compared to making an ssd where you pretty much just buy a controller you get some flash memory and you pretty much slap your brand on it so at the end of the day you need to make a decision between western digital seagate with the occasional toshiba drive or hgst popping up now they all make a ton of different hard drives for a ton of different purposes but for this video i'm just going to focus on large capacity nas drives or home server drives that are meant to run 24 7. let's go this video is brought to you by asus and their rog zephyrus g15 an excellent thin and light gaming laptop that offers amd's new ryzen 4000 series mobile cpu up to an nvidia geforce rtx 2060 gpu a 240hz ips display for that proper gaming experience and over 8 hours on one battery charge get yours using the links in the description below to decide which one is best for you we first need to decide what is important to you now obviously performance is a big thing and i really want to see how well each drive handles both large amounts of data as well as how it deals with lots of smaller requests now a little side note here none of these drives are smr drives and smr is a technology that makes it easier and cheaper to make large capacity drives but it can really ruin performance and reliability if you start using several of the same drives in a raid setup so obviously we're going to avoid that here noise is a big deal for me at least some of you might have dedicated server rooms but many people do not and loud hard drives can be really annoying and really resonate throughout an entire room so i'll be looking at the noise results in different scenarios today and of course we need to take power consumption in consideration because nas drives and servers usually run 24 7. unfortunately the most important aspect is the one i cannot really test in any useful way and that is reliability even if there was such a test by the time i'd have good data each drive will be replaced by an alternative and if we look back in time each of the big brands has had some really reliable drive series but also had some problematic models as well and it also isn't fair to just use that old information on older series to say anything about these new drives now if you're interested i will put a link down below to cloud storage provider backblaze that reports on their experiences with large numbers of different drives frequently now it's really really good information but it is also really important to remember that their extreme cloud server scenario isn't really representative of what a typical home or small business user will do so ultimately you will have to decide for yourself which brand you want to stand behind i expect most of you already had a bad experience with one brand or the other and you probably already made up your mind to buy the other one anyway now most importantly you really need to remember that any drive can break and no matter which drive you choose you should make sure you always have solid backups of your data now let's start with eight terabyte drives and here i have the seagate iron wolf western digital red and toshiba n300 and all three are made to run 24 7 and come with a three year warranty but there is one big difference now toshiba and seagate run at 7 200 rpm while western digital runs at 5400 rpm this doesn't really apply to all capacities because smaller iron wolf drives actually run at slower rotation speed as well looking at performance it does look like that rotation speed has a clear impact on performance now seagate and toshiba handle both large data sets and smaller blocks of data better than western digital with sigit just about beating the toshiba on average but there's a catch here even the speeds from the western digital red are higher that you can actually get through a gigabit network which is only around 100 megabytes per second so unless your nas or your server is on a 2.5 gigabit network or faster you'll actually be capped by your network speed and not by any of these drives here now the slower rotation does allow western digital reds to run a little bit quieter the sea gate isn't much louder though both are almost impossible to hear when running only the n300 becomes really audible but only during random access loads i tested noise in a controlled environment with the drives properly dampened to exclude other factors and if you have a cheap nas or case that doesn't dampen the drive expect the differences to get even larger and the western digital's noise advantage to get even more valuable here as for power consumption there actually isn't much between them western digital has a slight edge but it's not enough to really impact your buying decision here so between these eight terabyte drives seagate has a clear performance lead while still being nice and quiet and if you're on a multi-gigabit network it is pretty much the logical choice if you're on a gigabit lan with no intention to upgrade it in the next few years i do think that the western digital red is a very interesting alternative as it does run a little bit more quiet now especially if you can find it cheaper than the rest which is often the case in the us for example the toshiba and 300 here doesn't really bring anything to the table that seagate and western digital don't do better but if noise isn't a concern to you and you actually find these drives much cheaper than the alternatives they could still make sense here moving on to 14 terabyte drives and i don't have the toshiba and terabytes because it was either unavailable or crazy expensive to the point where i wouldn't recommend it anyway but i did get a western digital pro drive instead which is actually their performance focus nas model so like the 14 terabyte iron wolf the red pro is actually a 7200 rpm drive while the normal western digital red is still a 5400 rpm drive looking at performance we see a very similar result between the 14 terabyte iron wolf and the regular western digital red as we saw between the eight terabyte models with the iron wool being consistently faster than the regular red in every workload however the western digital pro is even faster in every benchmark making it a clear performance winner now looking at noise we see that the 14 terabyte drives in general are actually even quieter than the 8 terabyte models and that is because all these 14 terabyte drives are actually helium based the western digital red just beats the iron wolf in noise but the differences is really tiny but the even faster western digital red pro does a really good job here as well being completely inaudible in idle and standard file transfers but it does become a bit audible during random access so i guess that's pretty much the price you pay for its higher performance the red pro also uses a tiny bit more power under load as expected but again there's not really much between these three so similarly to the eight terabyte drives if you really care about silence the standard 14 terabyte western digital red makes a lot of sense especially if you're not really expecting to upgrade beyond the gigabit lan as your network will still be the bottleneck here if you are considering a lan upgrade i would recommend either the iron wolf or the western digital red pro drive instead which are both really excellent all around performance now the exact choice will probably depend on your location and the price in the eu the western digital red pro is considerably more expensive than the iron wolf and if you need several of them the price will just go up way too fast i think the combination of speed noise and price makes the iron wolf here the ideal all-around 14 terabyte drive at this point in the us however the price difference is much smaller and you only pay a tiny bit extra for the red pro and i would say if you don't care about the slightly higher noise level you can actually get a nice speed upgrade with it and you will also get a longer five-year warranty instead of the regular three-year warranty that the red and the iron wolf have so that's about it and at the end of the day you need to choose between western digital red and the seagate i will drive which is basically choosing between a bit more performance or a bit more silence but now with western digital red pro drives dropping in price we see an even faster solution at the more reasonablish price premiums or that's at least the case in the us now just do remember that you cannot really copy these exact results and apply them to other capacities as they will have completely different internal layout so if you're looking at a six terabyte drive or a 12 terabyte drive for example it's possible that the results will end up very differently than mine today now that is it from me for today and i'm really curious if you guys enjoy this kind of content i would love to look at some other nas related topics like comparing specific nas ssds for example or doing other capacities so please let me know in the comments down below if you guys would be interested in that now thank you so much for watching please like this video and subscribe to tech testers for more bye guys [Music] you

Channel: Techtesters

Views: 111,610

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Id: SEtEkp_nmZ4

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020