Head-to-Head: Two Brands, One Box (Profile Workloads)
Seagate vs. WD: Battle for the SOHO NAS Crown
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After all that explanation, many readers will still be wondering if much difference exists between different models of NAS hard drives. We decided to run the tests in-house and find out. This author procured four 4 TB Seagate NAS HDDs (firmware version SC44) and four 4 TB Western Digital WD Red drives (WD40EFRX-68WT0N0), the two leading consumer NAS-oriented drives on today’s market. We alternately installed these into a four-bay Synology DiskStation DS412+ NAS enclosure and configured each set into a RAID 5, as this would be the most common implementation of four drives in this type of SOHO/SMB device. Both drive manufacturers have tested and attained drive compatibility with Synology on their DiskStation DS412+.

Next, we hooked up the Synology to a Dell Latitude E6530 configured with an Intel Core i7-3540M, 500 GB hybrid hard drive, 8 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3, Windows 7 Pro, and gigabit Ethernet. Onto this, we installed our traditional Tom’s Hardware scripted Iometer (v1.1.0) benchmark loaded with several common business-oriented workloads. As there isn’t much to add on this front, let’s get to it.
Workstation Profile

In each of our profiles, Iometer delivers an exact summation of the read/write random/sequential mix used throughout the test process. As you can see, the workstation load uses predominantly random reads, the sort of load you might expect on a machine pulling files for CAD creation or similar tasks.

As of this writing, the 4 TB WD40EFRX ($188.99 at Newegg) uses a 64 MB cache and 5400 RPM spindle speed. This is exactly the sort of thing you would expect from a NAS drive. As most NAS data tends to be nearline rather than online, top speed generally isn’t a top priority, and vendors are happy to offer higher capacity-per-dollar and lower energy consumption than faster spindle speeds. The 4 TB Seagate NAS HDD ($174.99 at Newegg) also features a 64 MB cache but raises the spindle rate to 5900 RPM.
The remaining advantage for Seagate boils down to optimizations made in the firmware. Manufacturers generally resist giving out details on how they tweak data handling for different workload types, but we do know that Seagate released a firmware update for the NAS HDD shortly before this review, and readers might do well to remember that drive performance can and will change over time as vendors update their models.