Western Digital has made an addition to their drive line up, adding a Red series of 3.5″ SATA hard drives to complement their Blue (standard), Green (low power consumption) and Black (high performance) series. At the same time, they are dropping the Caviar moniker from their desktop drives.
The Red series of drives is targetted directly at NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices, which are gaining in popularity as shared storage units and networked backup for both small offices and home networks. Western Digital see the NAS segment as a growing market, while the growth in desktop computer and notebook computer drive sales is flattening.
The Red drive combines the lower spindle speed of the Green drive (called “Intellipower”, variable from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM) with the RAID optimized firmware of their RE4 Raid Edition drives. It is the firmware which differentiates the Red from the Green drives;Western Digital Greens have been shunned by manufacturers of NAS devices and builders of internal RAID (arrays of hard drive) systems, because the Green drives have been inconsistent performers in RAIDs. The Red drives change the firmware to provide consistent performance in a RAID environment and lower vibration – trading off raw performance for 24/7 reliability. The Intellipower system runs the drive motor at slower speeds when under low demand, with the aim of saving power and generating less heat – which are both concerns when you are running an array of three to five drives in a single enclosure.
They have backed the Red drive line with a 3 year warranty (compared to 2 years on the Green and Blue lines) and a dedicated 24/7 customer support line (1-855-55-WDRED).
Interesting that Western Digital sees this opportunity in the lower spindle speed market at the same time that Seagate has discontinued their ‘green’ Barracuda LP 5900 RPM line, stating that the hoped for power savings were not significant enough to be worth continuing the line.
Western Digital is releasing 1 TB (WD10EFRX), 2 TB (WD20EFRX) and 3 TB (WD30EFRX) versions of the Red drive. All of the drives will come with 64 Mb on board cache, and SATA 6.0 Gb/s interfaces. (Keep in mind that many motherboards and drive enclosures earlier than 2011 will not support 3TB drive directly connected to the SATA ports. Motherboards with UEFI BIOSes are fine with 3 and 4 TB drives.)
Here’s a quote from StorageReview.com
“Every home user who values their digital assets should have an aggressive redundancy and backup solution in place. A 2-bay NAS is a great starting point but larger 4 and 5-bay systems are gaining ground as well due to the expanding girth of our digital collections. When it comes to what drives to put inside a small NAS, the WD Red is a purpose-built drive that solves the NAS storage problem like no other drive does, instantly setting the standard for small NAS storage. “
CanadaRAM will be listing the Red drives as soon as they start shipping in Canada.