Western Digital Red: NAS-Specific SATA 6Gb/s Drives, Reviewed

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@hannibal

I agree. And boot times with a Red drive would be pretty bad given all of the random I/O. So if you're building the SBM $600 machine, you probably want something more like a WD Caviar Blue or Black, or someone else's drive altogether. These are really only suited for data storage, not system drives. Imagine a swapfile or something on this. Ugh.
 
[citation][nom]Saxie81[/nom]Why wasn't TLER mentioned in the review?? Being that it's one of the huge benefits while using these drives in a RAID config....[/citation]
Yeah, I agree. I looked for TLER in the Spec Sheet and there's no mention of any TLER support - http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771442.pdf Personally, I won't RAID any drives unless it has some form of 'error recovery control' and if you ever have a drive that's throwing errors you'll quickly understand why it's so important; without some form of ERC you'll essentially freeze up.

Drives like the WD's RE4 clearly spec TLER - http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701338.pdf

So my 'assumption' is the WD RED lack TLER; otherwise WD better fire the person who approved the Spec Sheet and correct it ASAP!

My only real 'bitch' of such is WD's games with TLER when most of the other consumer grade drives offer their versions of ERC. They've inadvertently caused me in most cases to go with and recommend other vendors that do offer it - especially in the Forum.

I've never heard of a HDD causing a 'fire' and the WD RED are too new for any 'reliability study' so I assume Troll(s) are a foot.

 
My understanding is that the Red drives support TLER ONLY while executing a SATA STREAM command... the rest of the time, they act like normal consumer drives.
 
What about the PRICE??

Two years after the flooding and prices are still at least TWICE (at least...) of what they used to be.

And now with this "Red" series, nobody can say their production is still lacking, out of stock etc., so I ask again - why the hell should I pay these super high prices for a less-than-average performance HD when I could have bought an RE4 drive at the same price (even less) - before the flooding began.
 
I could see drives causing a fire but usually because they have no air circulation and the are installed too close together. If drives are back to back like a giant brick of metal, there is nowhere for the heat to go. Bad case design is just bad case design.
 
If all the hard drive manufacturers are charging higher prices for hard drives then I would say it is Collusion. There is no drive shortage. People are wanting SSD's also. If there is a HD shortage it is created by the drive manufacturers. This would be like some gas station charging $10.00 for a gallon of gasoline! It is price gouging.
 
Really, though, those drives are well-suited for life in a NAS, with other mechanical devices clacking around. For example, Seagate’s Barracuda hard drives aren’t certified for the continuous operation networked-storage imposes.
Click to expand...

I think that that should say "are NOT well-suited..." A small difference, but almost certainly wrong.
 
Enterprise and nearline drives like Hitachi's Ultrastar, Seagate's Constellation, and Western Digital's RE4 families feature up to five platters and spin at 7200 RPM more
Click to expand...
Me again. 7200 RPM more than what? Perhaps "7200 RPM or more?" My compulsive proofreading gene seems to have gotten switched on.
 
Too bad these reviews don't address quality of support.
We purchased a WD 3TB MyBook NAS approx. a year ago. Setup was simple and both my DirecTV DVR and Sony Blu-ray player accessed the music files it held via DLNA. Wonderful! We could play music with the computers turned off. Then Frontier changed out my router to increase my bandwidth and the NAS is now available only to our computers and DLNA can only see our computers.
Here's the real problem: we are caught in support hell. No one is willing to assist us in getting the DLNA to work with the NAS again. They all say it's the other companies' problem and none of these jokers want to assist us.
At this point it appears my only solution is to find another brand of NAS and start from scratch.
 
Something that I read on another website in summary and filtered by my limited understanding:

When a sector fails on a drive without TLER (or some other software/firmware of the same purpose), the drive doesn't know, and the RAID doesn't know. So, theoretically, you have 4 WD Green drives set up in RAID5, and one drive has a bad sector, but doesn't know it and doesn't report it. Since that file is rarely accessed, the problem remains unknown. Then, two months later, a different drive in the array dies completely. The array tries to rebuild itself with a new drive, but when it finds the bad sector in the first disk we mentioned, it views the array as lost, and therefore the data is lost.

What the person on the other website who described this scenario is doing to counteract this is running a program that reads all data on all drives in his RAID once a day, so a bad sector would be discovered within a day, so he can replace the bad drive before a second fails and the array is lost.

But, if the drives have TLER (or some other brand's version of it) like the Red drives, it knows when there is an error and can rebuild that sector by itself, right away. And correct me if I am wrong, but if a drive fails and there is a bad sector on another drive, you can at least salvage the rest of the data. So Red drives are a huge improvement compared to the ticking time bombs of a RAID of Green drives. Those who have had good security so far have had good luck (and I hope we all have good luck in this regard).
 
So, is everyone in agreement that WD Red better fits the role of data drives, due to sequential speed and reliability and price, than other drives on the market? And that unless you have special needs requiring large drives with very fast access times, Red best fulfills every drive in every consumer and enthusiast computer that isn't the boot drive?

I'm hoping an expert can chime in on this. Manuel or Achim? Or others?
 
[citation][nom]ceh4702[/nom]I could see drives causing a fire but usually because they have no air circulation and the are installed too close together. If drives are back to back like a giant brick of metal, there is nowhere for the heat to go. Bad case design is just bad case design.[/citation]

I could see that if I were spraying high flammable liquids on my drives.
 
On this whole "Drives catching fire" nonsense:
1) Proof pics, & sources or it never happened, and;
2) Please tell me, outside of the paper label, what the hell is flammable in a mechanical hard drive!
 
Thanks for the great review! The day before this came out I had mentioned these in my podcast and now I've updated my post to include a link to this article.

I've been planning a home file server for a while (just waiting for HD prices to come down a little more) and now these are at the top of my list. Love the low power as that is a higher priority for me than pure performance.
 
[citation][nom]epsiloneri[/nom]. Eh, can you provide a source for that spectacular claim, or are you just trolling?[/citation]

Should of backed it up People are calming on Newegg that a lot of the drives are having problems, it may be something to do with this production run, I read that someone had his case catch on fire and lost two WD Red drives.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236342

People are also having problems with the 3tb models, and oddly though the 2tb models are doing fine, in terms of people's complaint.

I'm not trying to be a bad person saying that this is a bad product for my enjoyment, just trying to be a helpful member of society. I don't hold a grudge against WD and I proudly have a Western Digital Caviar Black in my pc for 3 years now.
 
As I read it, his case didn't catch fire, he melted his hard drive bays. That tells me that either: a) he has a cheaply manufactured case, or b) his cooling solution needs to be rethought, or c) some combination of the above. And while he says that "he doubts that it's the PSU", it would be nice if he'd listed his build spec's and readings on voltage, temperature, etc. I do find it interesting that WD support is all over it.
 
Drobo is solid, Synology NAS too, just kind of depends what you're after. If it were me though, I'd do a multi-drive NAS with another directly attached HDD over USB. I use a 2-bay Synology for time machine backups and storing media files, with a WD external hard drive that runs backups of the Synology.
 
[citation][nom]Saxie81[/nom]Why wasn't TLER mentioned in the review?? Being that it's one of the huge benefits while using these drives in a RAID config....[/citation]

I'm concerned about TLER as well. Do you know if TLER is enabled in these drives? It would make them an attractive alternative to the RE drives for RAID 5 where throughput isn't the top priority.
 
[citation][nom]mhult[/nom]I'm concerned about TLER as well. Do you know if TLER is enabled in these drives? It would make them an attractive alternative to the RE drives for RAID 5 where throughput isn't the top priority.[/citation]

I've read in several places it is enabled. I don't know why Tom's didn't mention it.
 
i was a bit surprised to see these red drives are more power efficient than WD's green drives (3.9 vs 6.1 watts at idle), kinda maked the green series moot now that they're not even the greenest drives anymore.

my current RAID5 consisting of four WD green drives is approaching 3 years (over 25000 power on hours) and i'm not keen to push my luck with them too far, i'll definately be looking at WD's red drives when the time comes to migrate to a newer and bigger array in the near future.
 
[citation][nom]f-14[/nom]the reviews say these drives aren't very good, they are prone to high failure rates similar to the 1TB 7200 rpm 64mb cache caviar black drives they make. i thought maybe it was just me, but the reviews say other wise.[/citation]

WD CB are the best drives WD makes hence the 5 year warranty. WD blacks always had high reviews. I personally had umpteen of them and never once had an issue. From CB 2.5" to CB desktop variants.
 
These drives scream to me of markitechture! WDs failure to provide a nearline 5 year warranty on these Red drives tells you that they are unwilling to put their money where their mouth is. This alone should be enough to dissuade an analytical thinker from ever purchasing one. It's also shameful that THG didn't perform an objective comparison of WD's Red drives with their Black and RE4 product lines! Comparing it to their Green drives is lame, as the reliability on those has proven to be poor. Even better question that was never asked, do the Red drives have 512 Byte sectors?
 
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