I see red, I see red I see red!, and I'm not the only one. New WD Red Drives Options

[ReapermanRS]

Since I know some of you maniacs like to play around with the odd NAS or 5.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/12/wd_red_nas/

WD has spotted a NAS niche in the SOHO (small office/home office) market and introduced its Red drive specifically for such customers, simultaneously bringing colour-code branding to the fore, ahead of its Caviar and Scorpio brands.

The Red hard drives are 1, 2 and 3TB 3.5-inch drives with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and they are designed to fit into 1- to 5-bay NAS systems. IDC says this market sector is one of the fastest-growing parts of the HDD market – notwithstanding some home users, professionals and SOHO users also being attracted to the cloud.

WD doesn't give away the actual spin-speed, merely saying it's Intellipower – meaning less than 7,200rpm – so we'd guess it's around 5,400rpm to 5,900rpm or thereabouts.

Previously users and suppliers building such systems – like Synology, Thecus and Dobo – could use desktop drives that don't have the reliability needed but are low-cost, or they could re-class enterprise drives, which do have the reliability required but are quite expensive, and are almost over-specced for the application.

The RE drives are now being positioned for multi-bay drive units with 6-8 bays for SME applications, 8-12 bays for enterprise use and more than 4 bays for surveillance applications.

[mudg3]

I like, these guys look like the Hitachi drives.

Good thing about them is that they have TLER and no intellipark

Main benefits of the reds is the availability of TLER (not really needed for software raid, but is handy for hardware raids) and the removal of the intellipark design (ie the short headpark time) the latter can be fixed on greens by using WDIDL.


If I was in the market for any drives for my server then I'd be looking at these due the scarcity of the Hitachi 3tb 5k3000 or 7k3000's

Listed on PCCG for $219

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_p...oducts_id=20886

Still a big shame considering I got all my 3tb drives for under $150.

[xyzzy frobozz]

Would someone be kind enough to explain a NAS to me? I understand that it's essentially an external RAID array, but is that all it is?

[SledgY]

Would someone be kind enough to explain a NAS to me? I understand that it's essentially an external RAID array, but is that all it is?

NAS = Network attached storage.

Can be anything from a single drive to RAID array, usually provide SMB (windows) and AFP (Apple) shares. Some have other functionality, Apple time machine, NFS, built in torrent downloading etc etc

Also (second result...) http://lmgtfy.com/?q=NAS

This post has been edited by SledgY: Jul 13 2012, 01:38 PM

[p0is0n]

We're having a hard time getting the hitachi drives at price/quantity we want at work, so this might be a nice solution to look into.. will need to get my hands on a few for "Testing" i think :)

Glad to see a better alternative to using RE4 drives anyway.

[xyzzy frobozz]

Would someone be kind enough to explain a NAS to me? I understand that it's essentially an external RAID array, but is that all it is?

NAS = Network attached storage.

Can be anything from a single drive to RAID array, usually provide SMB (windows) and AFP (Apple) shares. Some have other functionality, Apple time machine, NFS, built in torrent downloading etc etc

Also (second result...) http://lmgtfy.com/?q=NAS

Yeah, thanks.

[cleadge]

Just came across this http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/red-wd...x-nas,3248.html