Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
We liked
The Western Digital Red 6TB finally means 6TB disks are a realistically affordable prospect for everyone. While you still pay something of a premium over 4TB disks and lower capacities, it's worth it for fewer devices in your PC or NAS.
Sequential performance is excellent too. The read and write speeds are great for a consumer hard disk. The QD32 write speeds are in line with what you should expect from a hard disk of this capacity. A three-year warranty is also welcome – if your hard disk dies, a long RMA period is more than handy.
We disliked
You're not getting the absolute fastest disk performance here, and early shipping models had a bug in the firmware that reduced read performance. Western Digital's update has fixed this issue, but it's still worth noting.
Also, while this offering is clearly a lot less expensive than enterprise 6TB hard disks, some 4TB models are still relatively slightly better value for money than the Western Digital Red 6TB.
Final verdict
After solving the early firmware issue, the Western Digital Red 6TB is a great product. If you're building a NAS, or stuffing a desktop PC with double-digit amounts of storage with multiple hard disks in a RAID array, the Red series are the ones to go for.
As a system drive, an SSD is undoubtedly superior to any hard disk for application loading times, so the Western Digital Red 6TB is better placed as a drive for storage, or for large game installations.
