Ever Since Western Digital Launched Red Nas Hard drives, I wanted to test them. I finally Got a Chance last week when I wanted to upgrade my Qnap to 3TB.
I was excited to test these drives because
1. The cost is much lower to Enterprise Grade drives.
2. They have a specific firmware, WD calls NASWARE.
3. Active 3D balancing for less vibrations, Extended warranty and Support.
4. Purpose built for NAS boxes
Now you might ask, what about those who have been using WD Green or Segate Desktop drives with the NAS boxes. Well they are supported by all major NAS box vendors , but they are not designed for a 24×7 operation.
Before the arrival of Red drives, You would go with High Cost Enterprise drives if you loved your data. Now you have the option of RED which is not so expensive, but offers great protection.
So there are 3 areas where RED claims to be better than regular Desktops drives – Reliability, Performance and Power Consumption.
In my Qnap, I could immediately notice that these drives were noiseless. Probably because of Active 3D balance. I couldn’t hear then spinning like the Green ones.
Performance wise also they had a much better transfer rate than the Green. I tried copying a 2 TB Video file on RAID 1. The Green Drives wrote at 79MB/S and Red did at 107 MB/s. About 35% faster !!
For me the biggest reason to switch to Red would be great protection and reliability at such price. 3 TB Drive for AED 710 ( at the time of writing this article) isn’t bad at all !