WD Red Pro 6 TB Review - High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump

Specifications and Feature Set Comparison

Prior to getting into the performance evaluation, we will take a look at the specifications of the WD Red Pro 6 TB and see how it compares against the other NAS-specific hard drives that we have looked at before.

The WD Red Pro 6 TB 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 and HGST 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 for a drive targeting SMBs and SMEs. The table below presents the data for the drive against the others in our evaluation database.

A high level overview of the various supported SATA features is provided by HD Tune Pro.

WD Red ProSeagate Enterprise Capacity v4Seagate Enterprise NAS HDDHGST Deskstar NASHGST Ultrastar He6WD Red

We get a better idea of the supported features using FinalWire's AIDA64 system report. The table below summarizes the extra information generated by AIDA64 (that is not already provided by HD Tune Pro).