Running low on NAS drive space? Not any more
The recently released Seagate 8TB NAS optimised hard drive is one of the largest capacity drives we’ve ever tested. Just stop a moment to think about it. 8TB: that’s a ridiculously huge amount of space on a single drive.
Of course, business users will be accustomed to such large capacities, but the home user generally has just a few terabytes to play around with in their current NAS setup. The introduction of a pair of 8TB drives will certainly keep even the most prolific downloader happy for some time to come.
The current selection of Seagate NAS drives come in a variety of capacities: 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 5TB, 6TB and, of course, 8TB. They're specially designed for NAS duties, with customised error recovery technology, improved power management, vibration tolerance for optimal performance and a higher degree of reliability and stability than you'd find in a ‘normal’ hard drive.
The Seagate NAS drives also include a customised and advanced firmware called NASWorks. The technology behind NASWorks is designed to help improve the overall performance of a multi-drive NAS unit. The aforementioned error control and improved power management are a couple of features of this firmware, but that also coincides with the vibration control through the use of a dual-plane balance – which cuts down significant vibration across multiple drives when they’re all spinning together.
Seagate has gone to great lengths to test the new NAS drives in several popular NAS units. Big names such as Buffalo, D-Link, Netgear, Synology and QNAP are all tried and tested with the drives.
The 8TB model features a 256MB cache with a fast 7200rpm speed for a possible sustained rate of 216MB/s. Power consumption is 9W for the average operating use, dropping to 7.2W when idling and to a further 0.6W when in standby/sleep mode.
In terms of performance, the 8TB NAs drive performs well. The ATTO benchmark we ran returned a read speed of 215MB/s and a write speed of 185MB/s in the 4KB test. The 8MB test saw a read speed of 238MB/s and a write speed of 231MB/s.
The bigger 64MB test was quite impressive too, with a read speed of 238MB/s again and an improved write speed of 226MB/s. Overall, the 8TB NAS drive is no slouch.
For around £260, the Seagate 8TB NAS hard drive is a superb addition to both home and small office NAS solutions. The capacity is big enough to last for months, if not years. It’s quick and has enough business enterprise features to keep your data safe. David Hayward
Reliable hard drive with enormous capacity.