Western Digital Red Series Hard Drive
Western Digital Red Series Hard Drive
Western Digital announced the release of its Red Series Hard Drive. The drives are specifically optimized for small home and office network attached storage systems, such as those provided by its launch partner Synology Inc.
Essentially the drives are a slightly modified Western Digital Green Drive. Specifically the drives come with Western Digital Active 3D Balance Technology, which enables to drive to self balance its motor hub for various operating conditions. The results in much quieter operating conditions and longer drive life. The Red series drives come with 24/7 customer support as well as 3 year limited warranty.
Currently the drives are touted as having increase power savings, decreased operating temperatures, and RAID support. Additionally the “Nasware” features include:
- Streaming support - NASware provides built-in compatibility with the ATA Streaming Feature Set which is important for AV storage applications such as Windows Media Center.
- SMART Command Transport (SCT) support - NASware allows monitoring and measuring of drive performance via the SMART command set. SMART can return data like thermal profiles, drive access statistics and more. NASware also delivers temperature accuracy within 1°C.
- Power management support - Enables optimized power usage within the NAS system.
- BIC Performance - Optimized seek to provide BIC performance while reducing the power and acoustics.
- Save power and money - NASware optimizes power use resulting in significant power savings and lower hard drive operating temperatures. This improves the overall reliability and performance of the drive and reduces the NAS cost of ownership.
- Intelligent error recovery - With built in intelligent error recovery controls, NASware also prevents hard drives from being dropped off the RAID due to extended error recovery. This provides more availability and less down time rebuilding the RAID.
- Command completion -To further improve reliability, NASware minimizes the data corruption or loss in the event of an unexpected power loss by completing the command in process before shutting down.
The drives are offered in three sizes: 1 TB drive (model # WD10EFRX) @ $109.00, 2 TB drive (model # WD20EFRX) @ $139.00, and 3 TB drive (model # WD30EFRX) @ $189.00.
The Red drives are already up for purchase @ Newegg.com:
1TB WD10EFRX @ $109.99
2TB WD20EFRX @ $129.99
3TB WD30EFRX @ $179.99
A full press release can be found here and the product page here.
Category: featured
