> Test 1 Speed

Exactly how fast can these drives push data?

We connected each drive directly to our Mac using an Ethernet cable and copied a folder with 26GB of video files across. We fitted the NAS boxes with the same WD Red hard drives.

We expected times to be similar, but we weren’t prepared for just how close the Synology and QNAP speed tests would be, returning results within a couple of seconds of each other. The other two drives returned times that diverged more significantly, with the WD My Cloud speeding through the transfer and the Netgear taking significantly longer. The WD’s result could be down to it being configured to work with WD’s own hard drives, but we’re not sure why the Netgear performance was relatively slow. In real–world use, of course, these speeds are likely to be at the mercy of your Wi–Fi network, which will likely have a bigger impact than the speed of the unit’s Ethernet controller.