The Drives Inside:

The NAS 440 is populated with four 3TB Seagate drives, and the drives themselves are definitely worth checking out in greater detail. These are new products on their own, and only seem to be available inside Seagate branded enclosures at this point. I decided to pull one out in order to have a closer look...



In the image above we see that this Barracuda XT series drive is model number is ST33000651AS. Connecting it to a SATA 6Gbps port on a Windows 7 x64 based system allows us to run CrystalDiskInfo 3.9.1 on the drive, which presents us with the information shown below. It is a 7200RPM drive, with a SATA 3Gbps interface, and whose buffer size is apparently unknown. Digging around the web a bit more confirms that it should have 64MB of cache memory (buffer).



In the image above you see that the present drive temperature is 46C. The drive was pulled from the NAS 440 and immediately connected to a SATA header on the test system. Initially the drive reported a temperature of 48C, but it dropped to 46C by the time this screen capture was taken. It seems that while the Seagate LCD reports a temperature of around 40C, the drives inside are actually a bit warmer, even when they are not under a particularly heavy load.

The next screenshot is from Window's Disk Management utility, and is only provided to show the interesting configuration of partitions found on the drive. Keep in mind that this drive was pulled from the NAS with a RAID 5 array implemented, and then connected to the Windows PC without formatting. There are a total of six partitions on the drive (OK, 4 partitions and 2 unallocated blocks), but close to 100% percent of the usable space is available on the largest partition (2791GB of 2794GB).



While connected to the SATA port, it seemed only right to run a few benchmarks to gauge the performance of this new drive. The screenshot below captures the results from ATTO Disk Benchmark, which shows that the read/write performance is very respectable, especially for a big drive. Once you get above the 8KB transfer size test, the average speed for both reading and writing is about 150MB/s.



CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 was also run on the drive, and it confirms that around 150MB/s is the maximum for both read and writes on this drive.



While your typical NAS drive is probably a 5400RPM unit that will use less power and provide lower speeds (which will be of little consequence in a RAID array connected to a network), the individual drive's in Seagate's BlackArmor NAS 440 won't disappoint in terms of capacity or performance. And we'll investigate power consumption a little later.