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

Well WD Green disks are crippled with "green features". The NAS needs to control things like the disk spinning down, not the disk. If you want a WD disk, the WD RED is a much better choice than the WD Green.

There's a review here you might want to read: [quote="http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/western-digital-red-review-are-nasoptimized-hdds-worth-the-premium":3typ0imp]With the WD Red lineup, Western Digital continues its successful branding initiative. The three disks that we have had in-house over the last month have performed and held up quite well under stress. The disks have the optimal balance of firmware features necessary for usage in NAS systems. The icing on the cake is the fact that all of these features are configurable, if the end user so desires. The power consumption profile is also very attractive, and the reduced IntelliPower rotational speed doesn't seem to affect the performance much (at least in the SMB / SOHO 2 - 5 bay NAS systems that these drives are meant for).

Are these features worth the extra premium? We have no doubts about that, as the extended warranty period (3 years vs. 2 for the Green drives) and 24x7 support, as well as the lower power consumption should pay for itself over the course of the lifetime of the drive. Irrespective of the warranty / RMA possibility, consumers would do well to keep data on any hard drive (including the WD Reds) backed up (if possible, in a different location).

On the basis of our evaluation, we have no reservations in recommending the WD Red lineup as the drives of choice for a NAS system. As usual, it is extended usage and consumer reports a few months down the line which will tell the true story. At the moment, however, WD does have a winner in the NAS market segment with the WD Red hard drives.[/quote:3typ0imp]

Don't forget that RAID is often said to stand for ... Independant Drives.

There is no doubt about it, the RED disks are probably little more than tighter quality controlled Green disks with better firmware, but isn't that perfect?

Caustic wrote:
Don't forget that RAID is often said to stand for ... Independant Drives.

I think the modern definition is independent (changed by the RAID advisory board).

When RAID was first developed, the alternative was SLED ("Single Large Expensive Drive"). Large wasn't just capacity, it was physical size. For instance, look at this 1987 ad: http://hpmuseum.net/upload_htmlFile/Pri ... act-40.jpg Those 500 MB drives cost $17,600 each (in mid-80's dollars). And one of the selling points is how small they are!

By contrast, RAID let you aggregate the much smaller and less expensive 5.25" disk drives (still pretty new at the time).

The world is much different now!

The pricing on the WD Reds is very competitive now they have been on sale for a while, not much difference to the average desktop drives.

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.

So let me get this straight, you want a hard drive with quality control, a decent warranty time frame and not plagued with Green hell features so you can actually protect your data vs saving 1 watt of power a year. This use to simple be called the standard hard drive. Its like having to pay a penalty fee for opting out of the green movement.

What use to be a trend with eco-hipsters is turning into green bullying and pushing consumers into overly expensive, inferior products. Now this red drive is the next evolution which is trying to sell as a premium to get what use to be standard.

I have 9 RAID system running 4 drives each( 36 drives all together) and the vast majority of my problems have come from so called " Green drives" technology. Especially that seagate so called green drives.

How many more Solyndra disasters do we need?

I hope this everything green thing dies down, especially in the hard drive industry where it has no business being.

If I want to save power, I will tell my Readynas to spin down drive after 1 hour of no use.

Anyway, I think these Red drive should be the standard WD hard drive and there should not be a penaltiy 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 see your point armornone, and can sympathise with it. But i think today's modern "desktop" class hard drives all operate in a manner halfway between the Green and Red series drives from my experience. Now while this will work in the NAS (I'm using Samsung SpinPoints as you'll see from my sig) there are still some "Green" features on drives like this, albeit not as much as a dedicated "Green" drive.

My Desktop acts a bit like a NAS itself. I rarely switch it off, it's always doing "something". This is where I identify with your argument. On the other hand, having drives in your NAS that are designed for that purpose can only help to lengthen the prospective time between issues from where I'm sitting. Spend enough time reading these forums, and you'll notice that the largest numbers of help requests posted are to do with problems with hard drives. The Red's are reletively new to market as a concept, so nobody really knows at this point if they will live up to the hype. But for a little extra, if/when the need arises for me to buy new drives, Red's will be what I get. My data is important to me, so I want to give it the best chance of survival without having to constantly buy replacement hardware because of failure, if I can.

The ethics of what WD are doing is (at this point in time), a lesser consideration. At least from where I sit.

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.

Like StephenB says, you add up the cost of 4 new drives of desktop class, at 2TB and 3TB sizes, it's a lot of money your having to lay down. And it's a large leap of faith your taking at the same time. One of my friends has a Duo v1. He only ever switches it on with his main PC. It's not online 24/7. But he also doesn't run much in the way of automation add-ons, so this situation suits him. My NAS is on permanently, 24/7 and I'd wager the same is true for a lot of other folks on here. A desktop-class drive isn't rated for this kind of usage, and four enterprise-class drives would be prohibitively expensive. It's a calculated risk.

WD identified a gap in the market. They did what any company would do, attempt to fill that gap. The stranger fact is why Seagate, now WD's only realistic competitor in the HDD market, hasn't followed suit. But if I were a betting man, I'd lay odds on this situation not staying like this for long.

Just bought 5 of these from newegg for my RNP Business Edition: HDD 2TB|WD WD20EFRX 64M OEM - Red

Currently had 6 1TB discs and I needed to expand the volume. 2 of my current 2TB seagate drives have pending and reallocated sectors so it was time to expand.

Installed the 1st disk, could hear the platters crunching, removed it and put in another, same issue... removed it, tried a 3rd disk, same issue. So 3/3 discs failed right out of the box Finally tried a 4th one and it booted, synced and passed SMART test.

After the NAS was up with one new WD Red disc I decided to try my 5th and final drive from newegg. 5th one passed SMART data but when it was 5-10% complete syncing, the 1st WD Red drive failed and Frontview told me drive one and drive 3 were dead (both WD Red drives I just replaced.) So in a moment of panic I put both old drives back in the nas, rebooted, and thankfully the RAIDX2 volume booted.

I am just finishing up transferring 4TB of data to external drives so i can buy some other drives. Newegg must have pulled these out of a garbage can. I was this close to losing all of my data.

What I will do is:
#1 Pay more than $108.99 for a 2TB drive and stay away from the WD Red.
#2 Test each new drive on a PC by formatting long style, then testing SMART data.

I cant believe out of 5 new drives, 3 failed, and the other 2 have issues (already RAW read data errors and pending bad sectors in SMART data). Im sending them back to Newegg to say the least.