WD Red Pro 8TB Review: A Strong Choice for Demanding NAS Setups

I've been using two WD Red Pro 8TB drives in RAID 1 inside a QNAP TS-216G for over a month, and they've handled pretty much everything I've thrown at them. That includes 4K footage, Premiere Pro projects, PSDs, large movie transfers, and regular Plex and Jellyfin streaming.

Performance has been strong. QTS' built-in disk test returned sequential read speeds of 230.05MB/s and 239.83MB/s, while my real-world transfers were limited more by my network than the drives themselves. Over Wi-Fi, I saw reads peak at around 83MB/s, while a 75GB movie folder copied to the NAS at roughly 63.7MB/s.

Temperatures have also stayed under control, sitting around 34°C at idle and reaching 44°C to 45°C after a long transfer. The bigger compromise is noise. The Red Pro is easy to hear when it gets busy, especially with two drives running together.

The WD Red Pro makes the most sense for creators, small teams, or anyone putting their NAS through heavier workloads every day. If your NAS is mainly for backups, photos, and media streaming over gigabit Ethernet or Wi-Fi, the cheaper and quieter WD Red Plus is probably the better buy.

There isn't a lot to talk about when it comes to the design of a NAS hard drive. The WD Red Pro 8TB is a standard 3.5-inch drive, and installing both of them in the QNAP TS-216G was pretty straightforward.

The model I'm using is the WD8005FFBX. It spins at 7,200RPM, uses CMR, and comes with 256MB of cache. Once both drives were installed, I set them up in RAID 1, which leaves me with around 8TB of usable mirrored storage.

I went with RAID 1 because a good chunk of what I'm storing here is work-related. There's 4K footage, Premiere Pro projects, PSDs, along with my usual movie and TV show library, so I'd rather lose some capacity than have everything disappear if one drive dies.

QTS also makes it easy to keep an eye on both drives after setup. Over the past month, both have continued to show a Good health status, while WD Device Analytics reports them as Normal. I did have one unrelated NAS hiccup during testing when I locked myself out and had to perform a three-second reset. Thankfully, the reset left all the data on the drives untouched, so it ended up being more of a QNAP detour than anything to do with the WD drives themselves.

This is where the WD Red Pro starts to justify the “Pro” in its name. I first ran QTS’ built-in disk test to see what the drives themselves could manage without my Wi-Fi connection becoming part of the equation.

Those sequential read numbers are right around WD’s claimed speed of up to 235MB/s, so the drives themselves are performing pretty much where I expected them to.

Things change once I start accessing the NAS from my PC. The QNAP TS-216G supports 2.5GbE, but it is connected through my TP-Link Deco X50 setup at 1Gbps, while my PC is on Wi-Fi. So at that point, I’m testing the entire network path rather than just the drives.

I ran CrystalDiskMark 9.0.2 with a 2GiB test size and three runs.

Those numbers are useful, but I care more about what happens when I’m actually moving the files I use every day.

The 75GB transfer is probably the best example of what using these drives has actually been like for me. The copy stayed around 63.7MB/s for most of the transfer, without constantly jumping around, and finished in roughly 21 minutes.

Smaller files were slower, which isn’t surprising. A roughly 1GB folder containing images and PSDs took about 25 seconds, but it still felt quick enough for the way I use the NAS.

More importantly, I haven’t felt held back during normal use. I regularly move 4K footage onto the NAS, keep Premiere Pro projects and PSDs there, and stream movies and TV shows through Plex and Jellyfin. So far, none of that has made the drives feel like the weak link in the setup.

That said, my network is clearly holding them back. The drive-level QTS results show that there is far more performance available than the 60 to 80MB/s I usually see from my PC. With a proper 2.5GbE network and a wired connection, these drives would have a lot more room to stretch their legs.

It is also why I wouldn’t buy the Red Pro purely for speed if your NAS is going to live on gigabit Ethernet or Wi-Fi. In my setup, the heavier workload and extra endurance still make sense, but I’m definitely not seeing everything these drives are capable of.

Temperatures have been pretty easy to live with over the past month. When the NAS is sitting idle, both WD Red Pro drives usually hover around 34°C.

I checked them again immediately after copying the 75GB movie folder to the NAS. One drive had climbed to 44°C, while the other was at 45°C. That was after a long sustained transfer, so I'm quite happy with where the temperatures settled.

Noise, however, is a different story.

The Red Pro is easily noticeable when it starts working. During larger transfers, I could clearly hear the drives seeking and vibrating inside the QNAP enclosure, especially since the NAS sits fairly close to my desk.

Using a proper decibel meter, I measured around 58.8dB during file transfers. The room wasn't completely silent and there was some outside noise at the time, so I'd treat that as a rough real-world reading rather than an isolated measurement of the drives themselves.

It also represents the complete NAS setup, which means the enclosure, cooling fan, and vibration from both drives all contribute to the final number.

WD itself rates the drive at 36dB while seeking, although that figure is for the drive rather than the complete NAS. In actual use, the enclosure, cooling fan, and vibrations all add to what you hear.

That said, this hasn't bothered me enough to become a real problem. My NAS isn't sitting next to my bed, and when I'm actually working at my desk, the sound mostly fades into the background.

But if you are building a NAS for a bedroom, living room, or somewhere you really care about keeping things quiet, this is worth thinking about. The Red Pro is the noisiest drive in WD's Red lineup, and after using two of them together for a month, I can definitely believe it.

The WD Red Pro 8TB is the drive I'd look at if your NAS is doing real work every day. If you regularly move large video projects, run multiple services, have several people accessing the NAS, this is where the Red Pro starts to make sense.

It also makes more sense if you already have, or plan to move to, faster networking. With 2.5GbE or better, you have a much better chance of actually taking advantage of the performance these drives can offer instead of having the network become the bottleneck first.

But if your NAS is mainly for backups, family photos, Plex or Jellyfin streaming, and the occasional file transfer, I wouldn't spend the extra money on the Red Pro. The same goes if your entire setup is limited to gigabit Ethernet or Wi-Fi and you don't expect that to change anytime soon.

In that case, I'd go with the WD Red Plus instead. It is cheaper, better suited to lighter home NAS workloads, and is also the better option if you care about keeping noise down.

So the Red Pro is the one to buy if you actually need the extra endurance, workload rating, and performance headroom. If you don't, save the money and get the Red Plus.