HGST Deskstar NAS 4 TB Review

The traditional market for hard drives (PCs and notebooks) is facing a decline due to the host of advantages provided by SSDs. However, the explosion in the amount of digital content generated by households and businesses has resulted in the rapid growth of the SMB / SOHO / consumer NAS market. Hard drive vendors have jumped on to this opportunity by tweaking the firmware and manufacturing process of their drives to create lineups specifically suited for the NAS market.

We have already had comprehensive coverage of a number of 4 TB NAS drives and a few 6 TB ones. One of the drives that we couldn't obtain in time for our initial 4 TB roundup was the HGST Deskstar NAS. After getting sampled last month, we put the 4 TB version of the HGST Deskstar NAS through our evaluation routine for NAS drives. While most of our samples are barebones, HGST sampled us their retail kit, which includes mounting screws and an installation guide.

The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this review, we will discuss some of these aspects while comparing the HGST Deskstar NAS against other drives targeting the NAS market. The list of drives that we will be looking at today is listed below.

1. HGST Deskstar NAS (HDN724040ALE640)
2. WD Red Pro (WD4001FFSX-68JNUN0)
3. Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5" HDD v4 (ST4000NM0024-1HT178)
4. WD Red (WD40EFRX-68WT0N0)
5. Seagate NAS HDD (ST4000VN000-1H4168)
6. WD Se (WD4000F9YZ-09N20L0)
7. Seagate Terascale (ST4000NC000-1FR168)
8. WD Re (WD4000FYYZ-01UL1B0)
9. Seagate Constellation ES.3 (ST4000NM0033-9ZM170)
10. Toshiba MG03ACA400
11. HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 SAS (HUS724040ALS640)

Prior to proceeding with the actual review, it must be made clear that the above drives do not target the same specific market. For example, the WD Red and Seagate NAS HDD are for 1- 8 bay NAS systems in the tower form factor. The WD Red Pro is meant for rackmount units up to 16 bays, but is not intended to be a replacement for drives such as the WD Re. Seagate Constellation ES.3, Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 and the Toshiba MG03ACA400 which target enterprise applications requiring durability under heavy workloads. The WD Se and the Seagate Terascale target the capacity-sensitive cold storage / data center market.

The HGST Deskstar NAS is supposed to slot in-between the WD Red and the WD Red Pro. It doesn't specify an upper limit on the number of bays, but mentions only desktop form factor systems. Like other NAS drives, it is rated for 24x7 operation and includes a rotational vibration sensor for increased reliability.

Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology

Our NAS drive evaluation methodology consists of putting the units to test under both DAS and NAS environments. We first start off with a feature set comparison of the various drives, followed by a look at the raw performance when connected directly to a SATA 6 Gbps port. In the same PC, we also evaluate the performance of the drive using some aspects of our direct attached storage (DAS) testing methodology. For evaluation in a NAS environment, we configure three drives of each model in a RAID-5 volume and process selected benchmarks from our standard NAS review methodology. Since our NAS drive testbed supports both SATA and SAS drives, but our DAS testbed doesn't, only SATA drives are subject to the DAS benchmarks.

We used two testbeds in our evaluation, one for benchmarking the raw drive and DAS performance and the other for evaluating performance when placed in a NAS unit.

In the above testbed, the hot swap bays of the Corsair Air 540 have to be singled out for special mention.
They were quite helpful in getting the drives processed in a fast and efficient manner for benchmarking. For NAS evaluation, we used the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP. This is very similar to the unit we reviewed last year, except that we have a slightly faster CPU, more RAM and support for both SATA and SAS drives.

The NAS setup itself was subjected to benchmarking using our standard NAS testbed.

Thank You!

We thank the following companies for helping us out with our NAS testbed:

• Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E5-2630L CPUs and the ESA I-340 quad port network adapters
• Thanks to Asus for the Z9PE-D8 WS dual LGA 2011 workstation motherboard
• Thanks to Dynatron for the R17 coolers
• Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsZ 64GB DDR3 DRAM kit
• Thanks to OCZ Technology for the two 128GB Vertex 4 SSDs, twelve 64GB Vertex 4 SSDs and the OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88
• Thanks to SilverStone for the Raven RV03 chassis and the 850W Strider Gold Evolution PSU
• Thanks to Netgear for the ProSafe GSM7352S-200 L3 48-port Gigabit Switch with 10 GbE capabilities.