Page 11 - Conclusion
For about $225 at press time, the Western Digital Red Pro WD4001FFSX 4TB commands a considerable price premium over the $165 Western Digital Red WD40EFRX 4TB, HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB, and Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB. But before we get too carried away by the whopping $60 price differential, let me make it clear to you right now the WD4001FFSX was never made to compete against the trio of consumer grade drives we have tested back in 2014. Why is that? The answer is simple. Rather than saying the Western Digital Red Pro 4TB costs $60 more than its non-Pro counterpart, we should say it costs $25 less than enterprise grade Western Digital RE WD4000FYYZ 4TB instead. Equipped with practically the same hardware as the WD4000FYYZ, the WD4001FFSX features a multi-axis shock sensor, dynamic fly height technology, dual actuator technology, and StableTrac to ensure your HDD will play nice in systems equipped with up to sixteen drives concurrently. Sure, it strips away some workstation features like self-encryption, but if you are looking to deploy it in a corporate network attached storage system, you can probably do away with it. Saving $25 for each drive will really add up for any IT department. Furthermore, the Western Digital Red Pro 4TB is a very fast hard drive delivering top notch performance nearly across the board in all our benchmarks today. It takes the performance crown in all the right areas; not to mention its random access time is simply untouchable. Its power consumption is a bit high while idling from our tests, but was surprisingly efficient under load compared to the competition. All in all, if you are looking for a speedy enterprise grade hard drive to fill up a big NAS, the Western Digital Red Pro, stripping away what is unnecessary from the company's RE series drives, proves once again to be the weapon of choice for its intended market.
Western Digital provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH:Renewal Award | Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Western Digital Red Pro WD4001FFSX 4TB is a speedy enterprise grade hard drive designed for people with big network attached storage systems.
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Page Index
1. Introduction, Features, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Installation, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. NAS Performance, Power Consumption
11. Conclusion
