Western Digital announces Red NAS drive family
Western Digital's Red drive family is designed specifically for use in Network Attached Storage (NAS) enclosures.
The successor to Western Digital's reduced-power Green drives, the Red family of 3.5in SATA-connected hard drives feature reduced power draw compared to the Black drives but improved performance over the Greens. The drives also include something Western Digital is called 'NASware technology,' which it claims improves reliability and performance when the drives are used in multiple-bay NAS boxes.
As well as NASware, the drives include 3D Active Balance Plus, a technology Western Digital claims improves overall drive reliability by ensuring that the platters don't wobble as they spin.
'Until now, customers had to choose between using desktop or high-end server drives for their home or small office NAS systems – neither of which were both cost effective for consumer solutions and fully NAS compatible,' claimed Melyssa Banda, senior director of product marketing for Western Digital, somewhat disingenuously at the product launch event. 'WD saw this challenge as a perfect opportunity to design a better solution so we developed WD Red drives, an optimised product for this rapidly growing segment.'
As well as full compatibility with home and small office NAS systems - although the company has yet to indicate just why plain-old desktop-grade SATA drives are 'incompatible' with such systems - the drives include a three-year warranty and access to what Western Digital claims is a 24/7 'premium, dedicated support' service.
The drives are launching in 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB capacities. All models feature a SATA 6.0Gb/s interface, 64MB of cache, and spin at a variable pace using Western Digital's IntelliPower technology. Full performance details aren't yet available, but the company has claimed 150MB/s sustained transfer for the 1TB model and 145MB/s for the 2TB and 3TB versions.
While not yet available in the UK sales channel, US pricing has been set at $109, $139 and $189 respectively (around £70, £89 and £122 excluding taxes.)
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Discuss in the forums ReplyOh, and remember that RAID isn't a backup. That one bites a *lot* of people in the bum eventually.
The Green drives of equal size can be had for up to $20 less than the given prices for the Red drives. If there's no real great benefit I can see people saving a bit by going with Greens anyway. If you're looking at both a NAS and backup for said NAS you could save enough money to buy an entire hard drive...
Looking at Newegg, 1TB Red is $109 as stated, 2TB is $129 being a bit less than stated, and 3TB is $179 again a bit less than stated. It should also be noted that these prices don't include the $7 shipping which the Green drives get for free.
I've pitched it to the bossman, so watch this space.
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+rep - cant wait tbh , ` eejuts guide to linux nas` is really what most people actually want ; a `how to turn an old pc into something useful again - for free`
and thats the sort of writing your awesome at :D
I've got a 1TB Green drive currently...not a big fan. I always feel like it's on the verge of failure, especially when it's put itself to sleep and takes forever to respond. When it does that, I just wait in dread to hear the "click...click....click". There's a firmware fix that stops it from putting itself to sleep after 5 seconds, but after I had all my important data on it, I didn't want to update for fear of bricking it.
For the minor difference in power, relatively, I'll stick with 'normal' 7200 rpm drives. Although I inadvertently recommended a WD A/V drive to a friend and he's perfectly happy with it.
I'm still wating for prices to come back down - it's way too painful to shell out $140 for a 2TB drive when I paid $80 for one a little more than a year ago. That did kind of tear it for me, though; prices have come down to the point where my next drive will be an SSD. When I checked Newegg for an 80GB (needed a cheap boot drive), it was $99.99. When I can pick up a 128GB SSD for not much more than that, HDDs start to become stupid for anything less than a TB to be used for mass storage.
- no green sleep thingy (aka spindown after 8 seconds)
- less warranty
I had bunch of WD Green drives to fail, but except one WD20EARX they all were the first WD20EARS drives (WD20EARS-00S, 4 platter version). All WD20EARS-00M (3 platter version) and all but one WD20EARX are working fine.
Sure, in future i will buy red drives probably for my fileserver, if they won't be stupidly overpriced. But if they will be more expensive than Blue, then i will just buy Blue drives. Seagate (and because of that Samsung too now) is banned in my house :D.
Hmm, wonder what's wrong with enterprise grade RE4? Time Limited Error Recovery on them should stop the RAID controller dumping them because they're unresponsive.
Actually, doesn't the RE4 stand for RAID Edition?
Good to know - last time I looked into it, I couldn't find binaries of BSD (FreeBSD, as I recall), so I was left with attempting to compile it myself, and documentation was a bit lacking for someone who had never attempted to compile an OS. I'll have to check it out next time the Windows install on my server craps out.
http://web.archive.org/web/19961221025901/http://www.freebsd.org/where.html
That is the FreeBSD download site from 1996. Don't let the wording "The official sources for FreeBSD are:" confuse you :D.