Seagate Enterprise NAS 6TB HDD Four Disk RAID Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the Seagate Enterprise NAS 6TB HDD can be found at NewEgg for $399.89, at Overclockers UK for £179.99, or starting at €314.95 through Geizhals.

Conclusion

Storage is one place where you certainly don’t want to compromise while building your direct or network attached storage system. When you need a lot of drives and they need to have a lot of capacity, then you’ll have to look at the enterprise sector offerings such as these Seagate Enterprise NAS 6TB hard disk drives. The drives are rated for usage in systems with up to 16 drives which can equal up to 96TB raw capacity with these 6TB drives or even up to 128TB raw capacity when using the larger 8TB models.

The Seagate Enterprise NAS drives can work in such environments thanks to intelligent sensors and motors that keep everything balanced despite vibrations from all the other drives. The 7200 RPM spindle speed gives it an extra boost in speed aided by the 128 MB cache. We saw a hard disk that scaled extremely well in our RAID tests and even on this relative simple Intel RST setup they performed great. A proper hardware RAID controller would be able to squeeze even more performance out of these drives.

You should be able to enjoy these drives for a really long time after you purchased them as they come with great endurance and warranty ratings. Seagate is backing the Enterprise NAS HDD series with a 5-year warranty while the drives are rated for 300TB total bytes written (TBW) and they have a 1.2 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF) rating. For a relative cheap premium, Seagate also offers extended recovery services for the drives in case the worst should happen and a drive should fail.

Pros

• Great RAID scaling
• 7200RPM spindle speed, 128MB cache
• 5-year warranty, 300TB TBW, 1.2m hours MTBF
• Low total cost of ownership
• Supports up to 16 drive bays

“Seagate’s Enterprise NAS HDD showed equally great performance as it did in the single drive review. A good scalability will provide you with plenty of performance and storage alike.”

Thanks to Thecus for providing us with these sample drives