Western Digital RED 6TB 3.5″ NAS HDD Four Disk RAID 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

Western Digital has created a great drive with their RED 6TB HDD. It is designed specific for NAS usage and is a drive that is perfect for RAID setups. We saw great performance figures in all our benchmarks the drive also 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.

The speeds are amazing on this drive. While it doesn’t stand up to real enterprise drives, it does extremely well. We saw a performance up to 583MB/s reading and 326MB/s writing in RAID 0 mode and up to 415MB/s reading and 124MB/s writing in RAID 5 mode.

A RAID 1 mirror setup performed around 160MB/s on both operations while a combined stripe and mirror resulted in a performance up to 300MB/s and 250MB/s respectively. It is without a doubt a great and very fast storage drive, well worth a consideration.

“The Western Digital RED 3.5″ 6TB drive would be a good choice for any SOHO or SMB RAID setup. The RED series has great performance, low power consumption, and plenty of storage capacity.”

Thanks to Western Digital for providing us with these samples