Can WD's Red Drives Speed Up Your NAS?

[jjcrandall]

Tim,

Thanks for the article. I'm curious as to how the Red's compare against Greens, just because the greens also have lower spindle speeds. I have some 3TB greens coming in as well as some RED drives. I'm very impressed if the red's can deliver performance of a Seagate 7200rpm drive, at ~5000rpm speeds & thermals.

 

[thiggins]

I'm curious as to how the Red's compare against Greens,.

I was too. But, as noted in the article, I wasn't $600 curious.

The Reds are more of a marketing differentiation and reliability play vs. performance.

 

[vnangia]

I guess the question that comes up then is (a) how you'd be able to test that supposed additional 350K MTBF (≈40 years) on the Reds; and, (b) what the actual effect of being rated for 24x7 vs. 8x5 means - especially in a modern NAS where drives may be spun down for a large chunk of the time.

Any thoughts?

 

[thiggins]

I don't mean MTBF reliability. I mean less falling out of RAID volumes due to long error recovery.

That's the pitch. Time will tell if the Reds really do better than other drives.

 

[stevech]

speed: They're not 7200RPM. First order issue.
NAS may not support SATA III.

So the issue is warranty games, I suppose. I do NOT like the drive vendors' habit of replacing under RMA with a used drive with perhaps a zillion hours on the motor.

 

[beisser]

speed: They're not 7200RPM. First order issue.
NAS may not support SATA III.

So the issue is warranty games, I suppose. I do NOT like the drive vendors' habit of replacing under RMA with a used drive with perhaps a zillion hours on the motor.

the sata 3 thing is not an issue as it will run just as well on sata 1 or 2 ports.
wd seems to be very interested to have the drives certified with all major soho nas manufacturers, so there is hopefully no big compatibility problems like we had on the greens (600k+ loadcycle counts in less than 3 months, drive dies).

i do agree on the refurbished disks issue. the motor wont be the issue though. more like the bearings may wear out. none of us know their process of refurbishing a disk though. maybe they replace all degrading parts of the drive.

 

[travisco_nabisco]

Even if the performance is the same as the Greens, I would probably opt for the Reds just because of the longer warranty.

 

[stevech]

i do agree on the refurbished disks issue. the motor wont be the issue though. more like the bearings may wear out. none of us know their process of refurbishing a disk though. maybe they replace all degrading parts of the drive.

I agree.. by "motor" meant all the moving parts and the bearings are the Achilles Heel.

 

[Turick]

I have a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 2TB green drives and was ready to smash the thing. Constant errors, the whole thing would lock up randomly, web ui became unreponsive, and eventually I had my first drive failure. Replaced it and in no time it all started happening again. Second drive failure. It was really really frustrating. I ended up replacing all 4 drives with red drives last year and haven't had a single problem since. I had somebody try to talk me out of the green drives when I was putting my nas together and I didn't listen, but based on my experience I wouldn't use the green drives in a NAS again...

 

[stevech]

Among my NAS and quite a few PCs, I haven't had drive failures in a very long time (knock-wood)... not like the early-mid years of IDE drives where I expected a drive to fail in 1-2 years.

I have a pair of WD 500GB drives in a PC in the dusty garage that have run 24/7 for some 3 years.

But statistics of drive failures are, well, statistics.