Noise:
I have a Seagate 4TB NAS and Western Digital Red 4TB directly operated side by side in two SATA docking station to the noise to be able to directly compare. The Seagate ST4000VN000 is significantly louder than when starting the WD Red 3TB Hitachi 5K3000 or example. Rotates the hard drive, the Seagate is not necessarily heard louder than the WD, but the sound is the sound forth a little higher and therefore unpleasant. As long as only 1-2 hard drive are used, the difference for WD should be very low and therefore not buying decision. At 4-5 hard drives, the noise level but then at the Seagate but is höhrbar worse than the WD. So who is extremely sensitive to noise, is a very small advantage of WD Red. Overall, however, both disks are duchaus fairly quiet and there is only a small advantage for WD.
LCC:
A problem in recent years, both at Seagate or WD was the frequent and sometimes noisy parking the heads during periods of inactivity. The Load_Cycle_Count when reading the SMART data quickly reached problematic levels of some hard disks. Here at the Seagate 4TB NAS can be given seemingly clear, while the problem of WD Red 4TB (unlike the 3/2 / 1TB Red) occurs newly again (at least, the problem probably blasphemous by wdidle3 or idle3 tools (Linux ) resolve even with the 4TB Red). Given the durability problems of WD greens that might be partly attributable to the LCC problem LCC behavior of WD 4TB Red is still an extremely scary for me criticism.
Power Management:
Judging by several test results on the internet, the WD probably a little better power consumption than Seagate, which is probably also the frequent head parking and the slower rotational speed of the WD. For the Seagate has significant speed advantages for sequential read and write. The initializing, testing and repairing a RAID volume is on the Seagate hard drives much more quickly. In various test runs that made here quickly from 1-2 hours.
A major advantage of Seagate 4TB NAS is the support of APM in the firmware. The WD Red 4TB must be actively sent by the controller of the NAS / RAID hardware inactivity in standby. Under Linux, so does not work eg hdparm with -B or -S in the WD. So if no corresponding controller / NAS or software (eg hd-idle on Linux) has or intends to use the hard drive in an external enclosure times, with the Seagate served more effectively, because here the power management läst set firmly.
In conclusion: Both drives run here with a Areca 1261 Hardware RAID controller (firmware 1:49) so far without any problems and report both drives the identical number of sectors, so that a mixed operation in a RAID 5/6 is without capacity restrictions conceivable (but not necessarily advisable) ,
My opinion is: If you can live with a little bit more noise / power consumption, currently gets the Seagate 4TB NAS the unproblematic and faster NAS hard drive. WD 4TB NAS Red Buyers should the APM and LCC problems to be very aware of, even if you can get both with software quite well under control. Which of the two hard drives more durable in the long term, will probably only time will tell.