Western Digital (WD) RED NAS hard drives a Ploy?

armornone wrote:
I am not saying that the RED hard drives are bad but seems like a marketing gimmick for what we use to call a regular hard drive. ... Anyway, I think these Red drive should be the standard WD hard drive and there should not be a penalty for getting the basic features that people should get away with a hard drive. Its like paying extra for power steering in a car.

I wish it were true that "regular" hard drives just worked in a RAID array. And on some level I agree that it ought to be true.

But if you read these forums at all, you see lots and lots of users who are having difficulty with ordinary desktop hard drives in their NAS. For instance search this forum for ST3000DM001 - not a green drive (and on the HCL to boot). And that is only one of several examples.

Enterprise-class drives are the ones designed for server/raid environments, but they invariably cost a lot more than consumer drives. The fact that so many consumer drives simply don't work well in a RAID environment suggests that there is some cost involved in providing the needed features. And if manufacturers can make cheaper drives for the ordinary folks who don't need RAID, then of course they will.

But most of us home NAS folks don't want to pay the price premium for enterprise drives. Netgear has tried to provide the HCL list to give us less expensive choices that worked, but its pretty clear that isn't working out very well. People buy drives off the HCL because they can't find any models on it for sale in their region, and then they get denied support. Other people buy stuff on the HCL, but all too often still end up with drives that don't work.

On the other hand, these red drives do seem to be working well and they are much closer to consumer drive prices than enterprise prices. I don't see it as a ploy - personally I am quite prepared to pay the small price premium to avoid the crap shoot that I was dealing with before.