The biggest thing I've always noticed is the Black series has No-touch Ramp Load technology, so while they're warranted for 3 years Red, 5 years Black and likely go through similar quality control tests (possibly less for RED, as the constant heat and use will strongly increase its failure rate, I suspect they've cheeped out a bit on them to save costs to spend on the replacements, especially for government and top-tier support where for security reasons the defective drive is never returned or proven to be bad. Both have RAID optimizations, so unless your without AC or like it really hot the Red doesn't have any real advantage.
Otherwise the drives are virtually the same, minus the dynamic cache witch will likely help responsiveness with frequently changing non-repetitive tasks.
--If they only did what they should...add those two technology's to the red line, ever with the lower RPM....I'm sorry 5 tech's - multiple data processors, "CPT" to keep power-outages from stopping a critical file write before it finishes unloading from cache or the PSU catches back up with demand.. and #5... GIVE THE 2.5" versions the same amount of CACHE- NOT 16MB!
Even if they added the ram, it would be a close call - I'd say for my mom who refuses to use AC even when it's 130 F out.. Red might be better, but for me - it would need the no-touch tech which would tremendously reduce the ware and tear - so long as your not kicking it on a daily basis. less heat (even if they were 7200rpms - from the reduced size) and the immensely increased shock resistance (times 2 with no-touch) would give me huge faith.
--And with today's FIOS and google ISP, cable models with 10mbit/s uploads, and unlimited cloud storage for $60 a year, I would probably let it be stripped only, unless it utilized the extra drive to increase read speeds, then it would probably be worth it, since the drives max at 1TB each and we'd be talking about a 4-7,
===[ Slight add-on about the drives I chose for y last desktop --possibly more drives if I can find my really expensive PCI-E card in either storage or my pc at my dads place (to big for a plane trip). I saved up a good amount of time for that 3 or 4 years ago,1 or 2 GB DDR 2 or 3 cache? 16 connectors, SATA or SAS compatible but registers as a SCSI card (gotta love the reduced CPU usage) and a 4x SSD RAID w/ integrated ECC for a windows only ]--drive. Petty I almost never got the chance to use it before my injury. It sounds so antiquated now - but back then I opted for 4x 600GB WD Raptors and 4x 2TB for low-access archives. now most my drives have died and I'm forced to use unlimited cloud storage. before my last non-redounds die from the click of death... ]===
I hope your Drive array worked out well for you though! This small rant was more a draft for my blog and hopefully helpful info for others that find this on google/bing
(I try for Bing - for the free prizes, but it fails to find any results for many searches, even Microsoft ones - while google gives massive results for, and I always avoided google because before being bought alltheweb.com had at least 3-5 times as many pages indexed. I strongly miss that search engine- but now it seems I have free Hulu for life).
--IMHO: Black is a far better drive then Red/Red Pro in 4-5 ways, listed all on WD's website:
I'll leave one quote from WD's website as a final thought: Why the (Frell) is this not in any Red Edition HDD, When it should more likely be excluded from the Blacks and in every Red?!
"The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit."
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