Seagate Enterprise NAS Up to 6 TB

Competition on the storage market has always been fierce, with Western Digital on one side and Seagate on the other. So it’s kind of odd that the latter is only now releasing NAS-aimed hard disk drives, seeing as how WD did that months ago.

Network-attached storage devices are like very compact PCs that sacrifice all the computing power they could have, save for what’s needed to run the two, three, four, or more HDDs/SSDs installed in them.

They are miniature servers with plenty of LAN and (often) Wi-Fi wireless support, plus software specifically geared towards storage management.

They can use more or less any HDD up to a certain capacity (usually 4 TB, but some 6 TB and even 8 TB-ready models exist out there).

However, it helps their case if there are HDDs/SSDs specifically designed for NAS storage, with RAID support and everything else.

Western Digital launched the WD Red and Red Pro drives months ago. Now, Seagate is releasing the Enterprise NAS HDD series.
The Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD

The HDD has up to 6 TB storage space, a cache size of 128 MB, an MTBF of 1.2 million hours, and a bundled data recovery service.

These specs are somewhat surprising, as they are superior to those of the Western Digital Red Pro all around: up to 4 TB, 64 MB cache, 1 million hours MTBF.

Curiously, though, the Western Digital Red line does have up to 6 TB capacity and can have 16 MB or 64 MB cache. On the flip side, they can only be used in NAS devices of one to 8 bays, while the Red Pro and new Seagate drives can be installed in 8-16-bay devices as well. An odd contrast, this.

That said, the Seagate Enterprise NAS HDDs are pretty normal otherwise, with 7,200 RPM platter speed and compatibility with SMB/ SME tower and rackmount servers.
Availability and pricing

However, since WD Red Pro are supposed to be the main competitors, we can assume that the tags will be of $259 and above.