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What do you think of Western Digital's new Red NAS drives?

Aug 29, 2012 2:37 AM

I think they were launched a couple weeks ago and are made specifically for personal/home office NAS setups. They claim to run quieter and more efficient in a 24/7 running environment.

Features include 3 year warranty, 64 MB cache, variable RPM ("intellipower"), SATA 6 Gb/s, comes in 1, 2, & 3 TB.
http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810

My NAS enclosure has been sitting empty since I got it because hard drives went crazy expensive and it was more a toy then a necessity. Waiting for a sale could take forever since they are just launched. I want to know what you guys think before I decide to buy one or maybe just go with something else.
Is it all hype and any drive will do just as good?

skippykj skippykj

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So I did a little bit more digging and found that the RPMs are not variable. I ass-umed that listing it as IntelliPower was code for variable when in fact it's just them not trying to scare you by saying 5400rpm (which is the same as the green drives).

I found a good article going through the features and some tests comparing the 3TB to a Seagate Barracuda 3TB:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/western-digital-red-review-are-nasoptimized-hdds-worth-the-premium

Performance was pretty comparable despite the slower spinning and lower wattage.

skippykj skippykj
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I heard about his in a podcast... the hardware review guys seemed to be nicely impressed with them. Only one major difference from any other (green/black) drive you might use... they don't cause raid falures due to read/write timeout errors in the same way, this is good for the way RAID set up works...

theant theant
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Not sure about these Red drives but I do like the WD RE4 ones. I have a bunch of raid devices and I once used regular consumer grade drives in them. At first this seems like a cheap and valid alternative.

Unfortunately using consumer drives in a raid configuration caused my drives to unexpectedly drop out of the arrays. This caused me to have to rebuild the array (no data loss) and that is an extremely time-consuming process.

I then switched to raid specific WD RE4 drives. The raid devices have never dropped a drive from the array -- ever.

These Red drives may (but I'm not sure) be a consumer/small business version that is between a typical consumer drive and the more expensive RE4 ones. Gives you the minimum requirements for a raid system without the expense.

cengland0 cengland0

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