welcome to my unboxing and first look at Western digitals red series hard drive
so this is a five pack that actually only has four drives in it for a very
specific reason and I am extremely
excited about these drives and this hard drive packaging I mean look at this it's
like see it's flat pack and then it comes with perforation so you can fold
it which makes it fit perfectly in this delightful little box sorry guys I get I
get pretty excited about packaging these days you know packages really get me
excited um so we've got four 3 terb
WD red drive so what is a red Drive
let's start with a little bit of history of WD and their whole Drive colors thing
and I'm actually going to take it out of the anti-static bag so cameraman can
actually see the drive so back in the
day it was just WD caviar these days we have three well now
four but we had three different colors so we had black which is high
performance we had blue which is a
balance between performance and power consumption and uh as well as saving a
couple bucks versus the black drives and then we have green which is optimized
for storage and Energy Efficiency and then they've also got Velociraptors as
well but that's sort of it's it's like black on steroids let's call it that
10,000 RPM so this is all all the consumer 3 and 1/2 in drives Okay so so
where does where does red fit into this red is for Nas and store oh right
there's sorry there's re of course as well which is the premium Enterprise
level drives so WD hasn't really had a
drive in the past that is optimized and
uh and with with the perfect firmware and the perfect Hardware solution for
Consumer storage so they had re which
was optimized for Enterprise or business storage but was very expensive so so
many consumers were're running out and buying consumer level green or black
drives H or blue drives and putting them into these Nas enclosures or putting
them into raid arrays and their desktops because they wanted to build themselves
a workstation on the cheap and they need like a a high performance storage
solution for video editing or whatever else and what was happening was due to
the way that consumer desktop drives
handle error recovery so error recovery is built into any drive out there and
the Windows standard is that you wait at
once there's an error once the controller detects an error on the drive
whether it's being read or written from the it should wait and it should try as
many times as possible to recover that error before giving up on it so that's
the desktop standard raid controllers work off a completely different standard
and once the drive stops responding and is trying something like this for even a
couple seconds at a time it'll drop it from the array so that's why consumer
drives are not optimized for raid performance because what happens is once
they run into some kind of a problem they'll try as long as they can to
correct it which will drop them out of the array and makes them not ideal for
raid or Nas or storage applications so
red drives completely alleviate that these are using Enterprise grade
Hardware but at a lower performance and lower power consumption level than the
Enterprise drives because they're running at a lower spindle speed so they
are using a highquality binning process which means these are 1 million hour
meantime between failure drives they also come with a longer warranty than
the standard desktop drives that's a three-year warrranty and what another
part of the whole binning process that goes into these drives is the fact that
they are optimized for multi-drive use so when you have one drive actually this
drive is a perfect example because it's a 10K RPM drive when you have one drive
sitting in a drive bay spinning around and the read heads are moving all over
the place there's there's vibration no matter what there's always vibration you
can't get away from it however when you take four drives and you pack them in
tight next to each other and they're all vibrating you can run into problems
because the vibration from the one drive and the that's above and the vibration
from the drive below and if you have a bigger enclosure potentially the ones on
the left and the right can make this drive like moving around like this so WD
red drives in the binning process have much much tighter regulation in terms of
the amount of vibration that's allowed while the spindle spinning and while the
read heads and right while the heads are moving around inside the drive that
means they are beside ID being more reliable and running cooler they are
less likely to cause interference with the other drives around them next
compatibility WD actually validates the drives outright with many Nas enclosures
including this exact one which I keep pulling up because this is the one that
I'm going to be installing these drives in and testing them in and WD is using
not only at the chipset level but also at the finished goods level with guys
like qaps andology to ensure that if you buy an AZ and you put WD red drive in it
it'll work period if you guys have ever run into a RAID controller or enclosure
compatibility issue in the past you know what I'm talking about sometimes they
don't work and sometimes the not working isn't as simple as not detecting
outright sometimes the not working is more like it works for a while and then
stops working so that's uh that's you know much much much bigger of a problem
um I think that pretty much covers
everything I wanted to say about it for now so in summary it costs a little bit
more than a consumer Drive performs a little bit less than an Enterprise Drive
however you're going to run into a bottleneck at the controller or gigabit
Ethernet level you know if you're running multiple drives long before
you're going to run into a bottleneck at the 5400 RPM Drive stage um it has a
longer warranty comes with 247 phone support So you can call WD anytime and
it is pretty much the perfect drive for
storage applications for the general consumer and that is why people are so
excited about this drive right now thank you for checking out this unboxing and
first look online as Tech tips and don't forget to subscribe