AnandTech | HGST Deskstar NAS 6 TB Review - Print

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Introduction and Testbed Setup

The traditional market for hard drives (PCs and notebooks) is facing a decline due to the host of advantages
provided by SSDs. However, the explosion in the amount of digital content generated by the households and
businesses has resulted in the rapid growth of the SMB / SOHO / consumer NAS market. Hard drive vendors
have jumped on to this opportunity by tweaking the firmware and manufacturing process of their drives to create
lineups specifically suited for the NAS market.
We have already had comprehensive coverage of a number of 4 TB NAS drives and a few 6 TB ones. Earlier
this month, Seagate also introduced their WD Red Pro competitor, the Enterprise NAS HDD. We reviewed the 6
TB version and it turned out to be a great performer, albeit a bit costly for regular consumers. HGST aims to fill
that space with the 6 TB Deskstar NAS. It falls in the same market category as the WD Red. However, the HGST
Deskstar NAS drives have a 7200 RPM rating and the 5 / 6 TB variants come with 128 MB of DRAM cache. This
is expected to make them perform closer to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 and Enterprise NAS HDD
drives. In the remainder of the review, we will try to determine whether that is the case.
The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include
expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this
review, we will discuss some of these aspects while comparing the HGST Deskstar NAS against other drives
targeting the NAS market. The list of drives that we will be looking at today is listed below.
1. HGST Deskstar NAS (HDN726060ALE610)
2. Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD 6 TB [ ST6000VN0001-1SF17Z ]
3. Western Digital Red 6 TB [ WDC WD60EFRX-68MYMN0 ]
4. Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4 6 TB [ ST6000NM0024-1HT17Z ]
5. HGST Ultrastar He6 6 TB [ HUS726060ALA640 ]
Prior to proceeding with the actual review, it must be made clear that the above drives do not target the same
specific market. For example, the WD Red and the HGST Deskstar NAS units are for 1- 8 bay NAS systems in
the tower form factor. The Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD is meant for rackmount units up to 16 bays, but is not
intended to be a replacement for drives such as the Enterprise Capacity v4. The Ultrastar He6 is targeted
towards datacenters where its storage density and power efficiency lead to a lower overall TCO.

Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology

Our NAS drive evaluation methodology consists of putting the units to test under both DAS and NAS
environments. We first start off with a feature set comparison of the various drives, followed by a look at the raw
performance when connected directly to a SATA 6 Gbps port. In the same PC, we also evaluate the performance
of the drive using some aspects of our direct attached storage (DAS) testing methodology . For evaluation in a

NAS environment, we configure three drives of each model in a RAID-5 volume and process selected
benchmarks from our standard NAS review methodology. Since our NAS drive testbed supports both SATA and
SAS drives, but our DAS testbed doesn't, only SATA drives are subject to the DAS benchmarks.
We used two testbeds in our evaluation, one for benchmarking the raw drive and DAS performance and the
other for evaluating performance when placed in a NAS unit.
AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration
Motherboard Asus Z97-PRO Wi-Fi ac ATX
CPU

Intel Core i7-4790

Memory

Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY32GX3M4A2133C11

32 GB (4x 8GB)
DDR3-2133 @ 11-11-11-27

OS Drive

Seagate 600 Pro 400 GB

Optical Drive Asus BW-16D1HT 16x Blu-ray Write (w/ M-Disc Support)
Add-on Card Asus Thunderbolt EX II
Chassis

Corsair Air 540

PSU

Corsair AX760i 760 W

OS

Windows 8.1 Pro

Thanks to Asus and Corsair for the build components

In the above testbed, the hot swap bays of the Corsair Air 540 have to be singled out for special mention.
They were quite helpful in getting the drives processed in a fast and efficient manner for benchmarking. For NAS
evaluation, we used the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP. This is very similar to the unit we reviewed last year,
except that we have a slightly faster CPU, more RAM and support for both SATA and SAS drives.

The NAS setup itself was subjected to benchmarking using our standard NAS testbed.
AnandTech NAS Testbed Configuration
Motherboard

Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual LGA2011 SSI-EEB

CPU

2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630L

Coolers

2 x Dynatron R17

Memory

G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL (8x8GB) CAS 10-10-10-30

OS Drive

OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB

Secondary Drive OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB

Tertiary Drive

OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88 (1.6TB PCIe SSD)

Other Drives

12 x OCZ Technology Vertex 4 64GB (Offline in the Host OS)

Network Cards

6 x Intel ESA I-340 Quad-GbE Port Network Adapter

Chassis

SilverStoneTek Raven RV03

PSU

SilverStoneTek Strider Plus Gold Evolution 850W

OS

Windows Server 2008 R2

Network Switch

Netgear ProSafe GSM7352S-200

Thank You!
We thank the following companies for helping us out with our NAS testbed:

Specifications and Feature Set Comparison

Prior to getting into the performance evaluation, we will take a look at the specifications of the 6 TB HGST
Deskstar NAS and see how it compares against the other NAS-specific hard drives that we have looked at
before.
The Deskstar NAS sports a SATA III (6 Gbps) interface. As is customary for the high capacity drives in this
market segment, it can only emulate 512-byte sectors (natively 4K). The interesting aspect is the presence of a
128 MB cache similar to the Seagate drives, and unlike the WD Red. The obvious selling point for its price target
is the 7200 RPM speed, which should easily give it the lead in most benchmarks over the WD Red. The other
aspects (such as the URE ratings, MTBF, warranty etc.) are as expected. The table below presents the data for
the drive against the others in our evaluation database.
Comparative HDD Features
Aspect
DMA Setup Auto-Activate

Supported; Disabled

Supported; Disabled

Extended Power Conditions

Supported; Enabled

Supported; Enabled

Free-Fall Control

Not Supported

Not Supported

General Purpose Logging

Supported; Enabled

Supported; Enabled

In-Order Data Delivery

Supported; Disabled

Supported; Disabled

NCQ Priority Information

Supported

Supported

Phy Event Counters

Supported

Supported

Release Interrupt

Not Supported

Not Supported

Sense Data Reporting

Supported; Disabled

Supported; Disabled

Software Settings Preservation Supported; Enabled

Supported; Enabled

Streaming

Supported; Enabled

Supported; Enabled

Tagged Command Queuing

Not Supported

Not Supported

Performance - Raw Drives

Prior to evaluating the performance of the drives in a NAS environment, we wanted to check up on the best-case
performance by connecting one of them directly to a SATA 6 Gbps port. Using HD Tune Pro 5.50, we ran a
number of tests on a raw drives. The following screenshots present the results for the HGST Deskstar NAS.
Corresponding images for similar drives that have been evaluated previously are also provided in the dropdown box for easy comparison.

Sequential Reads

Single Client Access - DAS Benchmarks

The HGST Deskstar NAS was connected to a 6 Gbps SATA port off the PCH in our DAS testbed. After
formatting in NTFS, it was subject to our DAS test suite. While processing our DAS suite, we also recorded the
instantaneous transfer rates and temperature of the drive. Compared to the Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD, the
HGST Deskstar NAS remained at a lower temperature for the same access pattern.

The graphs below present the average transfer rates for the various workloads and how they compare against
other HDDs of the same capacity that have been evaluated before.

The HGST Deskstar NAS turns up at the top of the heap in a few benchmarks, but mostly checks in towards the
middle of the pack. Firmware optimizations as well as the extra cache (compared to the WD Red and HGST
Ultrastar He6) help to pull the Deskstar NAS forward in terms of performance numbers.

Single Client Access - NAS Benchmarks

Evaluation of single client performance in a networked environment was done by configuring three drives in
RAID-5 in the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP unit. Two of the network links were bonded (configured with
802.3ad LACP). Our usual Intel NASPT / robocopy benchmarks were processed from a virtual machine in our
NAS testbed. The results are presented in the graphs below.

For almost all workloads, there is no discernible difference between the performance of various drives,
indicating that it is the network acting as a bottleneck for single client access. Differences start to appear when
there are multiple clients accessing the NAS.

Multi-Client Access - NAS Environment

We configured three of the HGST Deskstar NAS drives in a RAID-5 volume in the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP.
A CIFS share in the volume was subject to some IOMeter tests with access from up to 25 VMs simultaneously.

The following four graphs show the total available bandwidth and the average response time while being
subject to different types of workloads through IOMeter. IOMeter also reports various other metrics of interest
such as maximum response time, read and write IOPS, separate read and write bandwidth figures etc. Some of
the interesting aspects from our IOMeter benchmarking run are available here.

We see that the sequential accesses are still limited by the network link, but, this time, on the NAS side. On the
other hand, our random access tests show markedly better performance for drives such as the HGST Deskstar
NAS. In particular, response times in the random workloads is almost 5x better over the WD Red when the disks
are subject to simultaneous accesses from a large number of clients. Against drives such as the Seagate
Enterprise Capacity v4 or the Enterprise NAS HDD, the Deskstar NAS does manage to hold its own. Anyhow,
the target market for those drives (and the firmware optimizations) are different enough to not make a big case
out of the observed performance differences.

RAID-5 Benchmarking - Miscellaneous Aspects

Consumers are rightly worried about RAID rebuilds and the scope for drive failures during that process. As one
of our evaluation aspects, we randomly yanked out a disk during operation and cleaned it up for rebuild. We
recorded the resync duration (time taken to rebuild a 3-disk RAID-5 volume when one of the disks needs to be
replaced) as well as the average power consumption during that process. The two aspects, considered
together, give an idea of the efficiency of the hard drive. The graph below presents the total energy consumption
(Resync Power Consumption (W) X Resync Duration (s)) for the resync.

While the energy consumption aspect provides a consolidated view of the various factors, it is still worthwhile to
look at the power consumption and resync duration numbers separately. The table below provides the raw
information behind the above graph. We had a brief inkling when the temperature of the Deskstar NAS remained
around 40 C only, despite more than 240 GB of continous data traffic, but the above energy consumption
numbers confirm the fact that the Deskstar NAS is indeed quite efficient. That said, the raw power numbers do
not look good for the Deskstar NAS in the table below. However, by getting done with the workloads earlier, the
drive can go to the idle state quickly and keep system energy consumption resonable in the long run.
RAID-5 Resync Power Consumption & Duration
Drive

Power (W) Duration (s)

HGST Deskstar NAS

101.46

36981

WD Red

90.48

52072

Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD

101.91

37284

HGST Ultrastar He6

95.36

45260

Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4

105.42

37462

We also measured power consumption during the last stage of our multi-client test. With 25 different clients
simultaneously stressing the NAS with different types of workloads, we recorded the power consumption at the
wall for the NAS as a whole. The various numbers are presented in the graphs below.

As expected, the units providing better performance have higher power consumption numbers. Amongst the
7200 RPM drives, the Ultrastar He6 is the most power-efficient. This is due to the HelioSeal technology (disks
spinning in a sealed chamber filled with helium). Amongst the conventional drives, the Deskstar NAS manages
to be the most power efficient for a few of the access patterns.

Concluding Remarks
The HGST Deskstar NAS 6 TB has been evaluated for both NAS and DAS applications and the numbers put up
for comparison against other 6 TB drives targeting this market segment. As expected, there is no 'one size fits
all' model in this area. The various hard drives in the comparison lot were launched targeting different markets
and their resulting performance varies accordingly.

Thanks to the 7200 RPM speeds, the HGST Deskstar NAS does manage to acquit itself well in the overall
performance category. Though it is not the absolute best, it performs admirably well in the random access
patterns segment of the multi-client evaluation.
The HGST Deskstar NAS doesn't deliver the lowest power consumption. Those were recorded, as expected,
with the 5400 RPM WD Red and the HelioSeal-technology based HGST Ultrastar He6. However, the Deskstar
NAS manages to almost win the efficiency category - thanks to the great balance between speed and power
consumption.
In terms of pricing, the HGST Deskstar NAS wins comfortably. It is, by far, the most price effective 7200 rpm 6
TB drive in this market segment. At $300, the Deskstar NAS is beaten in price only by the 5400 RPM WD Red,
which currently retails for around $270.
There are plenty of options for NAS users looking to stock up their NAS units with high capacity drives. 6 TB
drives represent the current bleeding edge, and consumers need to make sure that their NAS is compatible with
the chosen drive. One of the unfortunate aspects with the 6 TB Deskstar NAS was that one of the four drives
that we were sampled was consistently discarded with a 'Bad HDD I/O Access History' by our QNAP testbed.
This was triggered by a sense key error at the beginning of the initialization process (similar to what we saw for
the WD Red 6 TB version). The 'defective' drive, however, managed to pass extended S.M.A.R.T tests on our
DAS testbed. We are chalking this down to compatibility problems for the QNAP testbed with these new drives.
4 TB drives offer an alternative to the potential risk in going the new technology route with 6 TB drives for
cautious buyers. With the right data in hand, it's easy enough to find the best fit by taking into consideration the
expected workload and desired price points.The overall verdict is that the 6 TB HGST Deskstar NAS is a costeffective solution for SOHO / power user scenarios where storage density is of primary importance. One just
needs to make sure that their NAS is compatible with the 6 TB variant before going ahead with the purchase.