The form factor is the size of the space that you will need inside your PC to install the hard drives. These internal hard drives have a 3.5-inch form factor. However, if you don’t have an empty 3.5-inch bay in your PC, adaptors are available. Compatibility Unrecoverable Read Errors: Its unit is usually bits and it refers to every time how many bits of data are read from the hard disk, there may be an error that cannot be corrected. It is one of the most important parameters for evaluating the stability of the hard disk. The RPM of the two hard drives was very similar. The appearance was also not a factor that we took into consideration as it wasn’t a product we would be looking at. When installing the Seagate IronWolf and the WD Red, we thought they were both straightforward as long as you have the right equipment. Both worked very well, even with up to 8 bays in use. Our next benchmark measures 100% 8K sequential throughput with a 16T/16Q load in 100% read and 100% write operations. The WD Red drives kept up with the other drives for the most part, posting 55,137 IOPS read and 34,183 IOPS write. The Seagate NAS drives had slightly higher numbers, with 55,273 IOPS read and 39,453 IOPS write. The one area that the Seagate IronWolf did excel was with the drive health monitoring. It was very handy being able to keep an eye on how the hard drive is working.

Compatibility: Unlike desktop drives, WD Red Plus hard drives are specifically designed and tested for NAS and include NASware™ technology which fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads for optimum performance. Although the WD Red drives were in line with the others towards the beginning of our standard deviation benchmark (iSCSI), they fell behind towards the end. In the iSCSI configuration, the WD Red drives were in line with the Seagate Enterprise NAS drives in terms of write function (130ms) but fell short compared to the Seagate NAS drives (121ms). The WD Red drives were outperformed in terms of read function (105ms) compared to the other drives tested. Read performance was similar among all drives tested (460,000 IOPS), but the WD Red drives posted a write performance (172,000) that was significantly below the other drives.WD Red Plus drives are engineered to use less power (versus previous models) and run cooler, which reduces operating costs and helps reduce heat in thermally challenged NAS boxes. Hard drives that are not properly balanced may cause excessive vibration and noise in multi-drive systems, which could reduce hard drive life span and degrade the performance over time. Our enhanced dual-plane balance control technology significantly improves balance and increases overall drive performance and reliability. Once again, the results were similar when the drives were configured in iSCSI; although the numbers were close, the WD Red drives (98.35ms read and 173.3ms write) were outperformed by the Seagate NAS drives (80.2ms read and 155.5ms write).

After looking at the specifics and the pros and cons, we felt that the WD Red was the better internal hard drive. The difference in cost was very little and overall, the WD Red was more reliable. The NASware 3.0 technology made it much more convenient to connect with other devices. Once again, WD has delivered a great product that is durable and efficient while still being great value for money. The workload rate is the amount of data a user can transfer to or from the hard drive in the space of a year. The Seagate IronWolf and the WD Red drive have a workload of 180 TB/yr. This might vary slightly depending on your software and hardware. InterfaceIn the following section of this review, we will show the performance of both iSCSI and CIFS configurations of the new 3.5″ WD Red 8TB HDDs. WD supplied StorageReview with 8 samples of their new HDDs, which we configured in RAID10 in our Synology DiskStation DS1815+. A simple, secure, and cost-effective solution is an internal hard drive for your PC. These hard drives free up storage space on your PC so that your system can run faster and more efficiently. There is a range of different internal hard drives, but today, we are going to compare the IronWolf drive and WD Red All of the specifics will be placed in a comparison chart and before the final verdict, there will be some additional pros and cons.

The WD Red exhibited a more consistent write performance (CIFS) than the Seagate Enterprise NAS drives (191ms vs. 197ms, respectively), but less consistent than the Seagate NAS drives (167ms). In terms of read function, the WD Red drives were handedly outperformed by the Seagate NAS drives (591ms vs. 462ms, respectively).

Storage solution

The results of our max latency benchmark (CIFS) were scattered, but the WD Red drives posted lower latencies than the other drives for the most part. The Seagate NAS drives fell behind in this benchmark, especially towards the end. Reliability: Desktop drives aren’t typically designed for the demands of an always-on NAS environment. WD Red Pro hard drives are designed to perform under tough conditions encountered in high-intensity 24x7 multi-user NAS environments. We saw consistent results in the CIFS configuration of our average latency benchmark, with the WD Red drives performing slightly slower than the others and the Seagate NAS drives performing slightly faster.

Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. This stands for Mean Time Before Failure. You can expect up to one million hours before having any issue with the Seagate IronWolf or the WD Red. They have a power-on rating of up to 8,760 hours per year. This, along with the warranty, is a testimony to their reliability. Warranty WD Red Pro drives include Rotation Vibration (RV) sensors that anticipate and proactively counteract disturbances caused by increased vibration. By dispersing excess vibration across the drive chassis, turbulence is minimized, performance is maintained and drives are protected. As an industry-leading hard drive manufacturer, Western Digital stands behind their NAS storage solutions with the assurance of a 3-year limited warranty and world-class support services for hassle free data storage.

The results were similar in the iSCSI configuration; the WD Red drives were outperformed by both the Seagate NAS drives and the Seagate Enterprise NAS drives. In this part, I will make a chart to show you Seagate Ironwolf vs WD Red in the aspect of specifications: