Western Digital Red in the test: hard drives for use in NAS

introduction

Various hard drive series for desktop systems, laptops, servers, the multimedia sector or with low power consumption have been around for years. What was missing so far was a product range specially designed for use in NAS systems. As of today, this market will be served by Western Digital with the "WD Red NAS Hard Drive", which should be characterized by high energy efficiency, low operating volume, RAID-specific optimizations and suitability for continuous operation.

A comparison with a commercially available "Green" hard drive from Western Digital and an economical, also designed for continuous operation model from WD's enterprise portfolio will show what the new hard drive offers. Like our Red test sample, both have a capacity of 2 TB and work with variable spindle speeds.

The WD Caviar Green and the WD RE4-GP were kindly provided to us by the mail order company ARLT.

WD Red NAS HDD

The optimizations for NAS systems can be found in the WD Red NAS Hard Drive, which is suitable for continuous operation around the clock, especially in the firmware that the company has dubbed “NASware” for marketing purposes. It is designed to offer seamless integration and balanced performance. In addition, the customized error recovery is intended to prevent the drives from falling out of the RAID system due to long recovery cycles. However, the function itself is not new, but is also used for example in the RE-4 GP for the enterprise market.

The use in NAS systems for the home and SOHO area also means that Western Digital attaches great importance to high energy efficiency of the drives and a low operating temperature. The typical power consumption when reading and writing should therefore only be 4.4 watts. A well-known feature of economical hard drives is the variable rotation speed of the platters.

The operating noise is also low: The maximum of 24 dB (A) should not be audible even from quiet systems. The company even specifies only 23 dB (A) for idle operation.

Western Digital has also set up a free premium support line specifically for products in the Red series, which is intended to help with NAS-specific questions.

On the next page: test system