HGST Deskstar NAS 6TB 7200RPM Hard Disk Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

HGST’s Deskstar NAS 6TB drive comes in right on par with the WD Red drive where you get a lot of storage for a tiny price per GB. You can pick up a Deskstar NAS 6TB at NewEgg for $289.99, Scan UK for £223.92, or find a great deal through Geizhals where it starts at €273.69.

You can also get the drives in two and four packs if you need a lot and the retailers limits the quantity per customer/order.

Conclusion

HGST took all the knowledge they have gathered from the enterprise sector and applied it to this great performing NAS drive. The Deskstar NAS 6TB drive is rated to perform 20% better than competitors 5400 RPM drives, and it lived fully up to that.

We saw some great performance from this drive thanks to its 128MB cache and fast spindle speed, and the drive had no trouble reaching 230MB/s during sequential operations at both reading and writing. This is an amazing performance for a mechanical drive and one that will speed up both your file transfers, but also the access times. With a 12ms average access time while reading, the drive won’t need long to access the files you want.

Of course, a mechanical drive like this can’t live up to the speeds or access times that we see on a solid state drive, but that’s a given. However, the sequential speeds are on the limit that the SATA 2 interface can handle and it isn’t that long ago that this was the fastest speed that we could achieve.

HGST also applied a great vibration sensing system that doesn’t just acts when it detects vibrations, but predicts them and counter acts as they are occurring. This will make the drive run well at these high RPM spindle speeds, even in enclosures with many drives all creating their own vibrations that otherwise could affect the rest of the drives.

A drive spinning faster will naturally generate more noise than a slower one, and that’s also the case with this drive. Heavy benchmarking made the drive roar, but normal access for writing or reading isn’t much more noticeable than on the slower drives. It should however be something you put into your consideration when purchasing a mechanical drive.

Pros

• 6TB Capacity
• 24/7/365 certified with 3-year warranty
• 7200 RPM and 128MB cache
• Great speeds and performance
• Vibration

Cons

• Noise

“The HGST Deskstar NAS 6TB isn’t just the fastest NAS HDD we’ve tested, it’s the fastest Mechanical drive of any sort in our database. Fast spindle speeds and a large cache and the Deskstar NAS speeds away from the competition.”

Thanks to HGST for providing us with this sample