Until the arrival of the Red series, the only real way to ensure your drives were up to the job was to buy expensive server drives. The problem with using standard desktop drives in a RAID environment is that they often drop out of the array. WD has also set up a dedicated 24/7 support line exclusively for Red users, and is backing the drive with a three-year warranty. The equivalent Green desktop drive costs around £90, while a 2TB RE4 model will cost some £70 more than the Red version. Our review model, the 2TB version, costs around £100.
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While the Reds don't offer the same range of protection as WD's enterprise-focused RE drives, they are more resilient than a standard desktop HDD, and are competitively priced. Before the Red range appeared, if you were building your own one- to six-bay NAS device, your only choices were either standard desktop drives or much more expensive (but robust) enterprise drives. Internally the Red range of drives use 1TB platters, Marvell controllers and uprated 64MB DDR2 caches. Strangely, the single drive performance was actually a little better.ĪTTO: Megabytes per second: Faster is better WD sent us a pair of 2TB drives, so after testing one on its own we built them into RAID 0 (striped) and RAID 1 (mirrored) arrays and timed how long to transfer a 4GB photo file.
![wd red 2tb nas hard disk drive wd red 2tb nas hard disk drive](https://fp.lnwfile.com/zm5gwd.jpg)
NASware comprises a bunch of technologies aimed at keeping the drive(s) from dropping off a RAID array through extended error recovery, while also offering improved power management. WD has also added 3D Active Balancing, and a new technology called NASware in the firmware.ģD Active Balancing eliminates vibration by tuning the drive, which in turn boosts its reliability and performance.
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WD RED 2TB NAS HARD DISK DRIVE SERIES
This range takes the power-saving Intellipower spindle technology of the Green series and marries it with some of the 24/7 robustness of the RE-4 enterprise drives. Western Digital Red 2TB (3.5-inch 2TB) at Walmart for $89.99.