Western Digital 3.5″ Red 6TB NAS HDD Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Western Digital 6TB Red drive isn’t just one of the biggest, it’s also one of the cheapest. At least relative to the capacity you get, with just £0.03 / $0.04 per GB of storage. You can get 6TB of WD Red goodness at

You can get 6TB of WD Red goodness at Overclockers UK for £234.98, at Scan for £217.19, at Aria PC for £209.54, at Amazon for £230.84, and many other places. NewEgg has it for $266.00 for our American readers and German fans can find the drive at a price starting at €251.83 through Geizhals.

Conclusion

The Western Digital Red 6TB is a hard drive and as such doesn’t offer much design-wise, but why should it, it is a storage drive. Still, the sticker on the top has all relevant information you need in a layout that easy and fast to read. I would have liked another sticker on the end of the drive containing the serial number as it potentially could save you from having to unplug drives one by one until you find the one you’re looking for. The QR code allows for quick information about your drive by using your smartphone, great to quickly look up details when needed.

The WD Red 6TB drive features a very low power consumption with just 5.3w under load and 3.4w when idle. This will keep the overall running costs down as you save on the power bill in comparison. It also quickly validates an upgrade from older and smaller drives. Let’s say you’re running a 4 disk RAID5 setup with 2TB drives. You’ll effectively have the same 6TB capacity as in this drive, but it will consume at least 4 times the power. It also allows you to have a lot more storage in fewer bays, so you’re saving on the initial hardware costs by buying a smaller NAS.

The noise level is relative low on these drives, but you can hear them. It is hard to do anything about this as mechanical drives will create audible sounds and the internals are packed so tight that there just isn’t room for further sound isolation. With 25 to 28 dBa, these drives aren’t bad at all and probably won’t be audible inside a case for people without good hearing.

The speeds are amazing on this drive. While it doesn’t beat the VelociRaptor 10K drive on the reading speeds, it does in some writing tests. We saw performance up to 193MB/s reading and 180MB/s writing, that is impressive for a single mechanical drive. A WD RED drive isn’t a replacement for a Solid State drive, a mechanical drive can never beat those access times. And it doesn’t have to. It is without a doubt a great and very fast storage drive, worthy of your consideration.

Pros

• 6TB Capacity
• 24/7/365 certified with 3-year warranty
• Low price per GB of storage
• Reduced running cost through lower electrics bill
• Reduced hardware purchase needs due to available disk size per bay

Cons

• none

Neutral

• Weighs 725 grams

“The WD RED 3.5″ 6TB drive blasted almost any other SATA drive away that we’ve tested prior. The great speeds, enormous capacity, and cheap price per GB makes it a winner in every way.”

Thanks to Western Digital for providing us with this sample