HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8 vs HGST 6TB Deskstar NAS, 6TB Capacity Utilization

Get HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8 and HGST 6TB Deskstar NAS at OWC.
See also OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID-5 edition.

In general, larger hard drives maintain better performance as they fill up. But what if a slightly smaller hard drive is faster to begin with (when empty)?

The HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8 enterprise-grade hard drive falls off unusually much in performance as it passes the 6TB mark. Supposing one wants to store up to about 6TB of data, how does the He8 stack up against its much less expensive 6TB NAS sibling?

As the graph shows, the 8TB HGST Ultrastar He8 loses some of its luster when performance for 6TB of capacity utilization is considered: its 6TB HGST Deskstar NAS sibling outshines it for the first ~2.7TB of capacity utilization. From ~2.7TB to ~3.9TB the two are about the same. Only from 3.9TB to 6TB does the Ultrastar He8 start to reward.

The orange/blue pair for the 6TB HGST Deskstar NAS shows a clear performance advantage out to about 2.7TB of capacity utilization. If one were making a high performance partition of 3TB or smaller, the 6TB HGST Deskstar NAS is surely a faster choice.

Performance across first 6TB of capacity, HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8 vs HGST 6TB Deskstar NAS