Price and Availability
The HGST Deskstar NAS 6TB HDD is now available in the US and UK. HGST is offering a limited 3-year warranty for the drive. Currently it retails for around $260 in the US or around £215 in UK. The retail prices I mentioned are accurate at the time this review was published. Prices are expected to go down (or up), so if you are planning to buy one or two via online, check out the latest pricing and availability via the links below.
HGST Deskstar NAS 6TB Review: Conclusion
It looks like HGST has done a fantastic job with their Deskstar NAS 6TB drive. Based on the benchmark results from the previous pages, maximum sequential read/write speeds are about 229MB/s and 230MB/s respectively, with an average sequential speed of around 200MB/s give or take. Most of the time, it has consistently maintained above 200MB/s of sequential read/write speeds. For a NAS drive that is pretty much impressive considering that it is somehow on par with the WD Black 6TB high performance hard drive.
If you are planning to buy at least four (or more) of this drive and configured it to RAID 10, the system will benefit from a much faster performance. Based on the RAID-0 benchmark results I got, the performance of the drive are doubled as expected. RAID 0 doesn’t offer redundancy or protection, so if you want performance and protection at the same time, a RAID 10 setup would be worth considering.
Aside from the impressive speed and a large 128MB cache, HGST has also added a rotational vibration sensor that not only detects vibration, but also predicts them making it great for a multiple hard drive configuration setup. I wouldn’t say that the Deskstar NAS 6TB drives are ultra-silent, but they are silent enough during moderate use. However noise can be observed coming from the drives when they are pushed to their limits, but not to the point that it gets irritating.
I also don’t suggest that you use this drive on a fanless type of NAS. Because of its 7200 RPM speed, the drives can get hot specially during long hours of usage. In my case, it gets easily at 60° to 65° degrees Celsius which is not good at all. However, with adequate cooling or a dedicated fan pointed towards the drives, the drives’ temperature should be just below the 60° limit.
Finally, the HGST Deskstar NAS 6TB drives are certified to run at 24 hours 7 days a week with 1 million hours of mean time before failure rate and are back with a 3-year limited warranty. The Deskstar NAS 6TB drives offers a very competitive performance for a NAS drive, even when compared to a desktop hard drive. At the time this review was published, the Deskstar NAS 6TB is also the cheaper one compared to other 7200RPM NAS drives available in the market. If you are looking for a high performance NAS drive for your NAS system or desktop PC, the HGST Deskstar NAS 6TB drive should be on your top list.
