Hello,
I’m building a 4-bay NAS for home use, mainly for Plex media streaming, personal photo backups, and occasional file sharing for 2–3 users. I’m currently deciding between WD Red Plus 8TB and WD Red Pro 8TB.
My questions are:
- Is the performance difference between Red Plus and Red Pro noticeable for this type of home NAS use?
- How do they compare in terms of noise and power consumption, especially when all four drives are running?
- Does the 5-year warranty on the Pro make a meaningful difference for a home NAS?
- For a 4-bay NAS like this, I’d also be interested in real-world experiences with RAID 5 vs. RAID 6, particularly during rebuilds.
I’m mainly trying to figure out whether the Pro drives offer meaningful benefits for my workload or whether the Plus drives would be sufficient.
Thanks!
I’d go with the Red Plus unless your NAS is going to be doing substantially more than you described. In a 4-bay box serving Plex, photo backups and a couple of simultaneous users, the NAS/network stack is usually the bottleneck long before the difference between the Plus and Pro matters; the Pro’s higher spindle speed and throughput become more relevant with sustained concurrent I/O, heavier RAID workloads, large sequential transfers or a much busier multi-user NAS. The trade-off is that the Pro’s 7200-RPM mechanics generally mean more vibration, acoustic noise and power/heat than the 5400-RPM-class Plus, and with four drives running continuously that is noticeable. The 5-year Pro warranty is useful, but I wouldn’t treat it as a performance justification by itself. For RAID, I’d also think about fault tolerance rather than benchmark numbers: RAID 5 gives you one-drive redundancy, while RAID 6 gives you two, which is much more relevant once you’re rebuilding multi-terabyte disks and exposing the array to another failure during that rebuild. On a 4-drive home array, RAID 6 costs you a lot of usable capacity, so RAID 5 with a good backup strategy is a reasonable choice if the data is replaceable; if the data is important enough that a second drive failure during rebuild would be unacceptable, RAID 6 is the safer architecture. In other words, the Pro is a better drive on paper, but for your stated workload you’re mostly paying for characteristics you probably won’t exploit, while also accepting more heat, noise and power draw.
Thanks, that helps. I think you’ve convinced me that the Pro is probably unnecessary for this setup. I’ll also give RAID 5 vs. RAID 6 some more thought based on how important the data is.
