 By a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic Ticket Giveaway for a chance to win great prizes. Visit IntelGamingPromo.com to learn more. Welcome to our NAS Drive Roundup. So we've got two contenders, the WD-RED, which is the original NAS optimized consumer grade hard drive, and then we've got the newcomer, the Seagate NAS hard drive. So what they both have going for them is longer warranty periods than a typical consumer grade device, 24-7 tech support, as well as a 24-7 rated sort of operational workload. That's what they're designed for, to actually be used all the time in a storage appliance. They're both optimized for smaller rate enclosures. So for example, the RED is good for anywhere from one to five drive arrays. And there's a reason for that, because as much as I have always used just regular desktop drives in NASes, both Seagate and WD have lectured me about this because they're like, well, actually the vibrations that are passed between the drives can be a problem in the longer term, particularly when you pile more and more drives into an enclosure. So having drives that are optimized for resisting any errors that might be caused by that vibration is definitely a positive, positive thing. The one key difference between these drives is that the WD RED does tend to be a little bit more expensive on retailer shelves and is only available in a three terabyte capacity up till now. And performance of these drives in NAS enclosures is very much an unknown at this point. Not too many people have really looked into it. So we decided to take a Synology DS411. So this is their disk station quad bay enclosure. We've set up a RAID 5 in there with either four of the red three terabytes or four of the Seagate NAS drive four terabytes and decided to run some benchmarks because many people are looking at these NAS drives going, oh, well, they only run at 5,400 or 5,900 or whatever sort of eco optimized RPM. Because remember in a NAS enclosure, you want less power consumption and you want less power consumption. Did I say power consumption twice? Because what I meant to say was heat output for the second thing, you want less of both of those things. So running at a lower RPM does help achieve that. But what does that do to performance? Well, I'll tell you what we were expecting to happen is we were expecting the LAN interface right there, that gigabit LAN interface to be the first bottleneck. Even running in something like a RAID 1 configuration, which is two drive redundancy, no calculations. We are looking at about, I mean, we're looking at a maximum of 80 to 100 megabytes per second transfer speeds. If we're running in something like a RAID 5 for writes, we'll be lucky to get 25 to 35 megabytes per second write speeds, which means that a 5,900 RPM drive can keep up just fine. So the other bottleneck, like I said in RAID 5, is going to be internally here, the processor. RAID 5 is very calculation intensive. So basically what you do is you have at least three drives and one of the drives worth of space is allocated for a parody bit, which is pretty much a song that someone designs to sound like another song. And then they actually change the lyrics to make it more comic. No, no, not that kind of parody. The real parody is data that can be used to reconstruct the data on the other drive. So it's extremely computation intensive when it comes particularly to writing data to a RAID array. Anyway, without further ado, I'm going to put some charts and graphs up on the screen. That'll give you guys some idea of the performance differences we observed, which I think really backs up our hypothesis in a very big way. We ran several different tests, including real world small, medium and large file copy tests. And all of these numbers are reported in the time it took to complete the operations with either different set of drives. And then we also ran Blackmagic's disk speed test, which we've found to be a fairly reproducible and just kind of a quick and dirty benchmark. That gives you a synthetic benchmark as well as a real world benchmark to show you that we really didn't observe a difference in performance between these drives. So with no real performance difference between the drives, how do you pick which one to go with? And I think the answer is that it comes down to trust. Who do you have the best experiences with over the longer term or the people you know or whatever else? Do you want to pay more for the WD or do you want to pay less for the Seagate or do you need the four terabyte capacity that's available in the Seagate? WD doesn't have a four terabyte red yet. So there's all those things to consider. I know Slick just recently purchased four of the three terabyte WD reds for a personal rate array. So that should give you some idea what we think of the red, particularly internally here. And speaking of things that we think very highly of internally here, audible.com. So check out audible.com slash Linus. You can get yourself a free audio book by signing up and then you can obviously get a subscription. And after that, unfortunately, they're not free. But the good news is they have over a hundred and fifty thousand audio books that you can download now, whether it's older stuff, business stuff or the latest bestsellers. So, for example, I was just checking out the Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith or Galbraith or Galibrieth, whatever. 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