Western Digital's family of consumer hard drives has a new member after Blue (balanced), Green (low power), and Black (high performance); the WD Red. The new line of consumer SATA hard drives are designed to fill the vaccum between WD's cost-effective consumer hard drives, and expensive enterprise hard drives. Western Digital is specifically targeting SOHO (small/home office) NAS (network-attached storage) systems, with up to five drive bays. Such NAS devices are usually in the desktop form-factor, while those with more bays are usually in the rack-mount form-factors, and target larger businesses.
The WD Red is designed to offer durability comparable to enterprise segment SATA hard drives. For starters, they are designed for 24x7 operation, with energy efficiency. Think of them as a refined, durable version of WD Green. Since performance of NAS devices, particularly SOHO NAS, are limited by local network bandwidth (usually 1 GbE), the design focus of WD Red appears to be reliability, more than performance.
The WD Red hard drives are built in the 3.5-inch form-factor, with SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The lineup initially includes three models, the 1 TB WD10EFRX, 2 TB WD20EFRX, and 3 TB WD30EFRX. All three models feature 64 MB caches. Western Digital did not mention a specific spindle speed, and marked it as "IntelliPower." One would find a similar rating for WD Green, which have sub-5900 RPM spindle speeds that vary between 5400-5900 RPM, depending on the disk activity.
A USP of the WD Red is NASware, a combination of technologies that make the drives fit for NAS. These include improved durability for 24x7 operation, error-recovery controls that make the drives better suited for RAID, improved technical support from WD, and tested support for NAS devices. Western Digital will be working with a variety of NAS device manufacturers to ensure compatibility with their upcoming products. Available through select distribution channels, the 1 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB variants of WD Red hard drives will be priced at US $109, US $139, and US $189, respectively.
Read more: Western Digital Announces WD Red HDDs for SOHO NAS Systems by VR-Zone.com
Western Digital Announces WD Red HDDs for SOHO NAS Systems
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