HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB 3.5-inch Consumer HDD Review

HGST enters the NAS market with the Deskstar NAS in 3TB and 4TB capacities. Read on as Tyler explores the ins and outs of this high capacity HDD solution.

Published
Updated
Manufacturer: HGST
4 minutes & 37 seconds read time

Introduction & Specifications, Pricing and Availability

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Over the last few months, I have been running both of my NAS appliances with purpose-built drives. One NAS has a set of WD Reds and the other has the Seagate NAS solution. While each of these drives are great in terms of reliability, they do lack in one area: performance.

Now, I am not saying the performance of the above solutions is terrible by any means, but what if you could increase the performance of your NAS at the offset of a bit more power consumption? If you are one that is willing to sacrifice a bit in terms of power savings, HGST may have a solution for you in the Deskstar NAS.

Specifications, Pricing and Availability

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The Deskstar NAS, available in both 3TB and 4TB capacities, carries a 7200RPM spindle speed with 64MB of cache. Areal density is listed at 446 Gbits for the 4TB model and 425 Gbits for the 3TB model with load/unload cycles set at 600,000. In addition, we have a 10^14 BER with a MTBF of 1 million hours.

Idle power consumption of the drive is listed at 6.9 watts with a peak startup current of 1A for 5V and 2A for 12V. The HGST Deskstar NAS carries an MSRP of $229.99 for the 4TB capacity and $169.99 for the 3TB capacity.

PRICING: You can find the HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB HDD for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB HDD retails for $233.99 at Amazon.

Canada: The HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB HDD retails for CDN$343.48 at Amazon Canada.

Drive Details

HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB

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Our sample of the Deskstar NAS was delivered in retail packaging. The front of the box carries a bit of marketing information along with capacity and cache information up top.

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Here we have the front of the drive with a manufacture date of January 2014. Capacity is listed in the fine print at 4TB along with the spindle speed at 7200 RPM.

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The back of the drive reveals the teal colored PCB with several Torx screws holding it in place.

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The PCB houses the LSI controller next to 64MB of Samsung DRAM.

Benchmarks - Test System Setup and ATTO Benchmarks

Desktop Test System

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ATTO - Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

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In ATTO read testing, we have the HGST NAS coming in around 170 MB/s, not far off the WD Black, but 15 MB/s quicker than the WD Red and Seagate NAS drives.

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ATTO write testing pushed thing a little closer, with the HGST NAS right with the WD Black and 10 MB/s quicker than the other two NAS drives.

Benchmarks - 4k Random Performance & Sequential Performance

IOMeter - 4k Random Performance with QD

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In 4k random read, we find the HGST NAS a bit quicker than the WD Black in higher QD.

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With 4k random write, you can see the HGST NAS is the top performing 4TB solution in our charts.

IOMeter - Sequential Performance with QD

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Sequential read has the WD Black taking the top spot back from the HGST NAS, which in turn holds onto second above the WD Red and Seagate NAS.

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With sequential write, we see more of the same; the HGST NAS comes in ahead of both other NAS drives.

Response Times and Power Consumption

Response Times

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With the HGST NAS drive leading the chart in our random testing on the previous page, it does not come as much of a surprise to see it also lead the charts in response times. Here we can see the drive is about 24ms quicker at QD32 than the Seagate NAS and 20ms quicker than the WD Red.

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Again, with random write, we see similar results. The HGST NAS comes in 40ms quicker than the WD Red at QD32 and 17ms faster than the Seagate NAS.

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Moving over to sequential response times, we find the HGST NAS slightly quicker than both competing NAS solutions.

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In sequential write testing, the HGST NAS came in at 24ms with the WD Red at 29ms and Seagate NAS touching 28ms.

Power Consumption

Our custom power testing samples each drive for a period of three minutes across each workload. In order to offer more granularity, we sample the power in one-second intervals.

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Power consumption for the HGST NAS is a big tradeoff. Here as you can see we start at 8.8 watts in random workloads and jump to 9.2 watts for sequential workloads. This is significantly higher than the WD Red, which peaks at just under 6 watts, and the Seagate NAS that touches 6.4 watts at its peak.

Final Thoughts

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With HGST's entry into the NAS market, end users now have more options than ever when building a storage appliance. While the HGST may be another NAS focused drive, it does offer a tremendous amount of performance over competing solutions, due to its higher spindle speed and large cache.

One tradeoff of the HGST NAS is the much higher power consumption, and while it does not quite consume as much as the WD Black, it does consume almost 2 watts more than the WD Red and Seagate NAS, making a traditional four-bay appliance consume nearly 10 watts more.

On the plus side, the HGST NAS offers an across-the-board performance improvement with the most important being response times. As we saw in the charts on the previous pages, the HGST NAS is actually quicker than the WD Black in response and random workloads, and is not too far off in sequential read and write, as well.

Compared to the competing WD Red and Seagate NAS, the HGST carries quite a marketable performance increase but, as stated, uses on average 2 watts more. Reliability of the HGST NAS is yet to be determined, but as these units start to enter the market, we should see reports from end users as to how these drives fare. One thing we know for sure is HGST has set this drive up for success with a 1 million hour MTBF and a non-recoverable bit error rate of 10^14.

MSRP of the HGST Deskstar NAS in the 4TB capacity is set at $229.99 with a three-year warranty. Current market pricing can be found below.

PRICING: You can find the HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB HDD for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB HDD retails for $233.99 at Amazon.3

Canada: The HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB HDD retails for CDN$343.48 at Amazon Canada.

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Tyler joined the TweakTown team in 2013 and has since reviewed 100s of new techy items. Growing up in a small farm town, tech wasn't around, unless it was in a tractor. At an early age, Tyler's parents brought home their first PC. Tyler was hooked and learned what it meant to format a HDD, spending many nights reinstalling Windows 95. Tyler's love and enthusiast nature always kept his PC nearby. Eager to get deeper into tech, he started reviewing.

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