Western Digital WD Red 1 TB Actual User Experience?

The WD Red was released in July: http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=64fea6c4-5cba-45de-a6cc-af3537d6763a

So no long term experience with it yet. It's pretty much a WD Green drive with a few tweaks to make it more suitable for NAS use, I think.

Thanks mdgm, I was certain they were introduced in Nov '11, thanks for the clarification. Are you utilizing this disk? I'm wondering if someone could speak to power on hours vs. LCC's. I know there are many other reasons disks fail, but since this seems to have become an issue, I was hoping there may be some 'Red' users that could give feedback.

I have the 3 TB model, it's been powered up for 1230 hours, and has a load cycle count of 8. I think that is due to occasional spin down - the start/stop count is 14, and the power down count is 6, so that would add up.

mdgm wrote:
...It's pretty much a WD Green drive with a few tweaks to make it more suitable for NAS use, I think...

According to http://www.anandtech.com/print/6157

Less aggressive head parking (no IntelliPark feature) Configurable Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), with a default of 7 seconds IntelliPower disk rotation speeds (comparable to Green drives) Vibration reduction mechanism in hardware

The first three are firmware tweaks, but the last one is a hardware mod.

They also increased the warranty to 3 years (presently 2 years for consumer drives, though last year this time it was 3 years for all their consumer drives).

I can't speak for the 1TB models. I have 3TB ones in my NV+ V2.

Initially, I had purchased 3x3TB drives to use. 2 of them were DOA.
It took over 6 weeks for Memory Express to get new ones in.
So I was just running the one drive until I got my new working drives a week or so ago.
So far, so good. Quick (getting 103MB/s read on AFP on my Mac,) quiet, and they seem like they are doing the job (the NAS hasn't emailed me saying a drive has been borked.)
Aside from the DOAs, the Reds have been pretty good.

Back at the end of August, I purchased a new Pro 6 from Newegg and part of the combo package was a WD10EFRX. (The combination of the two was $10 cheaper than the Pro 6 alone, so I went ahead and got the drive). The array did consist of two Hitachi Green 3TB drives about a year old and two Seagate 1TB drives about two years old. One of the Seagates was a refurbished drive and the other had a low count of errors on it. So, I replaced the Seagate with the low error count with the WD. It now has 1128 hours and LCC count of 7, a power off retract count of 6 and power cycle count of 14. When Newegg had a deal on the WD10EFRX, I bought another and it replaced the refurbished Seagate. This drive has been in service about 27 days (641 hours) and has an LCC count of 1, a power off retract count of 1 and a power cycle count of 3.

I had avoided WD drives for use in the Raid environment like the plague until the Reds came out. But then the Hitachis became unavailable and Seagate seemed to be going through a period with firmware issues. WD seems to have hit a home run with the Reds, and they are certainly in demand and general short supply with a slighly higher price as a result.

For comparison, the first Hitachi in the Pro 6 now has 11,620 hours (484 days) on it and has an LCC of 34, power off retract count of 34 and a power cycle count of 30. The second Hitachi had 11, 612 hours on it and an LCC of 31, a power off retract count of 31 and a power cycle count of 28. I am very pleased with the Reds and will definitely be adding more of them to my HD count.

StephenB, anhloc & PapaBear,

Thank you for your responses I appreciate your input - it's invaluable - have a great day, m.

On further point. I looked at my other unit, the NVX BE that is in backup service, and the first Hitachi in that array had slightly less than 11, 400 hours and an LCC of 781. But it also had the same number for start/stops and power cycle and power off retract count. It also had disk spin down enabled which most likely accounts for the high count. If you are going to be evaluating a drive for those numbers, you might want to make sure spin down is NOT enabled.

PapaBear wrote:

On further point. I looked at my other unit, the NVX BE that is in backup service, and the first Hitachi in that array had slightly less than 11, 400 hours and an LCC of 781. But it also had the same number for start/stops and power cycle and power off retract count. It also had disk spin down enabled which most likely accounts for the high count. If you are going to be evaluating a drive for those numbers, you might want to make sure spin down is NOT enabled.

Since drives are spec'd to handle at least 150K (and usually 300K) LCC, I don't think 10-15 load cycles per week should be a concern to anyone.

I am not worried, my point was that I had two identical arrays (until I replaced the two Seagates in the primary with two WD Red label drives) and one has an LCC count in the mid 30's and the other has an LCC count of almost 800), this fact at first surprised me and then I realized the difference was that I had drive spin down enabled on the backup unit since it was only active about 4 hours of the day and not on the primary since it is active most of the day. I initially had it set on both arrays, but the delay in loading files was aggravating.