Conclusion

The new Western Digital Red family of NAS hard disk drives is quite an interesting enhancement of the Western Digital Green family of low-powered, slower-spinning hard disk drives (formerly known as the Western Digital Caviar Green family). It is basically an improved WD Green drive that is cooler, quieter and vibrates less, with a special firmware that Western Digital calls NASware.

When Western Digital announced the new Red family of NAS hard disk drives, there was some skepticism about the usefulness of its NASware firmware. It could be nothing more than a marketing gimmick - a combination of already existing features like TLER and Streaming ATA commands with some minor new features tacked on. However, our tests show that the NASware firmware does have a real effect on the drive's performance, and it's a significant effect.

Western Digital appeared to have optimized the WD Red drive for sequential accesses, sacrificing random access performance in the process. When we compared it to the 3 TB Western Digital Caviar Green (WD30EZRX), the WD Red was much slower in random reads, even though it had a much higher throughput from its higher density platters. This was confirmed to be due to a much higher random access time - almost 50% higher in small random reads!

However, when it came to large amounts of sequential reads and writes, the WD Red (WD30EFRX) was a far superior drive, delivering 80% better performance than the WD Green (WD30EZRX) in small sequential accesses and 18% better performance in large sequential accesses. Do note that the WD Green (WD30EZRX) is almost identical to the WD Red (WD30EFRX), differing mainly in the areal density of their platters... and of course, their firmware.

What this means is that the WD Red is a specialized hard disk drive, designed for use in NAS systems where only sequential accesses matter, especially large sequential accesses. Its other features like vibration-control, lower noise and thermal output as well as low power consumption are attractive, even to desktop users. However, it would be a very bad idea to use a WD Red as your desktop's boot or system hard disk drive, because its poor random access performance will make your system feel slower than an equivalent WD Green drive.

If you are a NAS user, then the WD Red would be an ideal drive to populate your NAS unit. But you should heed Western Digital's recommendation for using only up to five WD Red drives in a single NAS unit. While it is possible to load your larger NAS units with more than five WD Red drives, the lack of more advanced vibration control may result in lower reliability. For NAS units that use more than 5 drives, Western Digital recommends their new enterprise-grade Western Digital RE drives.

For the lowest current prices on Western Digital Red hard disk drives, click here!

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