Techgage has provided a review of the new Western Digital Red NAS hard drives. These drives are specifically designed and configured for use in Small Business and home NAS servers. One of the features of the Red hard drives is a change in error control so that the NAS RAID configuration handles error correction and has disabled automatic head parking while still retaining excellent (low) power consumption:
Red drives have an error recovery time set to a very low value, allowing your NAS to be in charge of handling errors (which it should be). In a similar vein, problems that arose with WD's own Green drives in the past had to do with head-parking. With desktop drives, this is typically fine, but it's not for NAS usage which generally demands 24/7 access. Here, WD disabled the parking entirely - but that doesn't mean that power consumption has been worsened as a result. In fact, we'll soon see that Red drives offer the best power consumption of any other desktop offering in WD's line-up.
The Red drives offer a longer warranty (3 years) and other advantages over the WD Green desktop drives, including lower noise:
Though Red drives carry a premium over the Green, I'd say the added year on the warranty makes it worth it. But to sweeten the pot, Red is more power efficient, can operate in hotter environments (actually beating out the rest of the desktop line) and perhaps best of all, is much quieter (24dBA vs. 29dBA of the Green). All in all, the Red sports great features for the price.
The testing done in the review was accomplished using a Thecus 5 bay N5550 NAS server running 5 of the Western Digital Red drives. Testing compared the Western Digital's enterprise-level RE4-GP, a four-platter 7,200 RPM drives. Techgage found that, generally, the Red drives were comparable to the enterprise level drives for most tests and edged out the enterprise level drives in a few:
WD's Red has proven victorious in its battle against the RE4-GP, which in some regards, is a little unfortunate for those on the enterprise side of things. The most up-to-date RE4 drive, the WD2003FYYS, still has 4 platters sized at 500GB each, so performance from it and the -GP we've tested here wouldn't be that different. The reason that might be a sour note to some is that RE4 drives cost far more (~$230 vs. ~$130, 2TB models), but under-perform in comparison. There are of course other factors to weigh in, such as warranty, but the RE4's loss is the Red's gain - if you plan on integrating Red into your NAS or server, you can rest easy knowing that the performance is top-rate.
Looks like the Red drives are the ones to beat in small NAS performance. With quite reasonable cost compared to the enterprise drives, cost-performance comes out in the Red drive's favor.
Related articles
- Western Digital Red Drives for NAS Devices Reviewed (nas-pro.com)
- Western Digital Red Review: Are NAS-optimized HDDs Worth the Premium? (anandtech.com)
- Western Digital Red NAS Drives - Worth the Price Difference? (nas-pro.com)
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