Western Digital Red Hard Drives

Western Digital's new line of Red drives ?has been specifically engineered to work with NAS devices. These 3.5-inch SATA drives can be installed in most of the common NAS devices on the market including those from Synology, Qnap, D-Link, and Drobo. The Red drives support NAS drives with up to five drive bays. Western Digital states that its 3D Active Balance Plus technology provides enhanced balance control designed to maximize drive performance and reliability. That is hard to prove without extensive testing, but the Red drives did give performance gains in Write and Read speeds in testing, making WD's Red drives worth considering for those needing fast and reliable NAS performance.

Specs
WD Red hard drives ship in 3.5-inch 1TB (model number WD10EFRX, $109 list), 2TB (model number WD20EFRX, $139 list) , and 3TB (model number WD30EFRX $189 list) capacities. The drives all have 64MB cache and support speeds up to 6GBps. Although Western Digital does not specify their spin rates, the Red drives use WD's Intellipower technology, which provides RPMs between 5,400-7,200rpm.

The Red drives measure approximately 1 by 4 by 5.8 inches (HWD), fitting easy into the typical NAS drive bay.? The 1TB and 3TB drives each weighs 0.99 pound and the 2TB model weighs 1.40 pounds.

The drives are Advanced Format certified, meaning they are 4KB long-data sector-based drives. In addition, the drives are RoHS compliant and have SATA latching connectors.

Performance
I tested the Red drives in Synology's DiskStation DS1812+ . The DS1812+ originally shipped with five drives: three Samsung HD103SJ drives (which are 1TB and spin at 7,200rpm) and two Seagate Barracude 1TB drives (model number ST 1000DM003). The drives were configured in the DS1812+ using Hybrid RAID (SHR), Synology's proprietary RAID solution. SHR provides one disk worth of data redundancy; if a disk fails, the data volume will remain available for use. SHR also provides easy storage capacity as larger disks are added to the RAID configuration.

I swapped out the five original drives with five WD Red drives. The drives were reconfigured with SHR and then tested for performance with the same methodology we use to test SMB SATA-based NAS devices. The DS1812+'s performance using the WD Red drives when compared with the original drives the NAS was shipped with is as follows:

• Original drives: Write speed: 83MBps, Read speed: 71 MBps
• WD Red drives: Write speed: 107 MBps, Read speed: 100 MBps

Although the original drive configuration gave us some of the highest performance numbers for an SMB NAS that we?ve tested, performance got even better with Western Digtal's Red drives.

While the Red drive proved to boost Read and Write speeds during testing, the questions remains, are these drives which are pricier than other SATA drives on the market?for example, WD's 3TB caviar drive, is about $20 less than its Red counterpart?worth the extra cost?

It's hard to quantify Western Digital's?claims about features such as superior error recovery control prevention and support for more reliable RAID rebuilds, but you can't dismiss the fact that the company offers 24/7 support plus a three year warranty.
One of the biggest banes of NAS ownership is drive failure. Many of the SMB-level NAS devices that the Red line is designed for are shipped diskless. This leaves customers selecting and installing their own drives. Compatibility issues between drives and the NAS device can cause drive failure and other problems. For environments that require NASes with high availability and reliable fault tolerance, drives specifically engineered to work with NASes, are worth considering.

For small businesses and power users that have heavy dependence on a NAS device, particularly for those using a NAS that's regularly getting a lot of data written to it, the Western Digital Red line of SATA drives for NASes, is a worthy investment and earns 4 out of 5 stars.

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