Western Digital Red Drives
When we were looking for drives to test with the N5550, there was one model specifically that came to mind. Western Digital recently introduced a new series of drives made specifically for NAS called Red series drives. They shipped three of their 1Tb drives out for testing with the N5550, leaving a little room for expansion in the future but still a chance to see how the Red drives perform and hold up in a NAS environment.
So what sets the Red drives apart from everything else that Western Digital sells? First you have to understand their product lineup for consumers. Western Digital has four consumer product lines for internal drives, three of those you have most likely seen before. The Green, Blue, and Black series’ of drives all have different priorities. The Green line for example are low noise, low heat, and low power drives. They aren’t designed to be main drives; performance isn’t the priority in this case. That is exactly the opposite of their Black series drives, designed for top performance only. The Blue series drives fit in the middle between the Black and Green as a middle ground normal drive.
As you can tell, the original three drive series’ are all focused on in PC use. The Red drives are set apart a little because they are designed specifically for NAS use. This means the Red drives have a few features that set it apart from the others. Let’s take a look at those features.
Western Digital took a few key features from their enterprise drives to give the RED drives their NAS support. Part of that is keeping the thermals and vibration down, this is especially important when you are running multiple drives close together. Here is an image that Western Digital has on their website showing the difference in thermals between a competitor and one of their Red drives. As you can see, the bearing isn’t putting out heat. This has a lot to do with reduced vibration, and putting less load on the bearing. They did this by using what they call 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology.
Something else that sets the Red drives apart is their compatibility in NAS environments. Some of you may have run into this in the past, but the Western Digital Green drives were known for having issues in a lot of NAS and server boxes. Red drives are tested for compatibility with a list of different NAS options, you can see the full list HERE. This way you know going into it that you won’t have any issues once everything comes in. There is nothing worse than getting excited about parts coming in, only to have to wait to send them back and have new parts come in.
Another issue that you will run into when dealing with consumer drives in a NAS is problems with a RAID failing seemingly randomly. This is due to the way consumer drives handle error recovery in comparison to business class drives. To put it simply, consumer drives will attempt to correct the issue longer, locking the drive up during that time and sometimes causing the drive to drop out of the RAID. The Red drives handle this situation like enterprise drives and have a lower time allowing the RAID to react quicker and pull the info off of another drive for recovery without disrupting your computing. The Red drives are currently configured for a soft time limit of 7 seconds, but this can actually be adjusted as needed using software like smartctl.
Where things get a little fuzzy in the Red specification listing is when you go to look up the drives actual spindle speed. Typically this is how you would get an idea of the drives performance. Western Digital lists this officially as IntelliPower; this is similar to the Green series of drives that run at 5200 RPM at most. This wouldn’t be a big shock considering that the Red drives are taking a lot of the features of the much more expensive RE4 drives, having the same RPM might cut into the RE4’s market a little too much.
