WD Red Western Digital NAS Hard Drive Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,182 words · ~5 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look at Western digitals red series hard drive
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so this is a five pack that actually only has four drives in it for a very
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specific reason and I am extremely
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excited about these drives and this hard drive packaging I mean look at this it's
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like see it's flat pack and then it comes with perforation so you can fold
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it which makes it fit perfectly in this delightful little box sorry guys I get I
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get pretty excited about packaging these days you know packages really get me
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excited um so we've got four 3 terb
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WD red drive so what is a red Drive
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let's start with a little bit of history of WD and their whole Drive colors thing
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and I'm actually going to take it out of the anti-static bag so cameraman can
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actually see the drive so back in the
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day it was just WD caviar these days we have three well now
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four but we had three different colors so we had black which is high
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performance we had blue which is a
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balance between performance and power consumption and uh as well as saving a
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couple bucks versus the black drives and then we have green which is optimized
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for storage and Energy Efficiency and then they've also got Velociraptors as
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well but that's sort of it's it's like black on steroids let's call it that
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10,000 RPM so this is all all the consumer 3 and 1/2 in drives Okay so so
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where does where does red fit into this red is for Nas and store oh right
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there's sorry there's re of course as well which is the premium Enterprise
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level drives so WD hasn't really had a
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drive in the past that is optimized and
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uh and with with the perfect firmware and the perfect Hardware solution for
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Consumer storage so they had re which
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was optimized for Enterprise or business storage but was very expensive so so
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many consumers were're running out and buying consumer level green or black
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drives H or blue drives and putting them into these Nas enclosures or putting
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them into raid arrays and their desktops because they wanted to build themselves
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a workstation on the cheap and they need like a a high performance storage
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solution for video editing or whatever else and what was happening was due to
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the way that consumer desktop drives
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handle error recovery so error recovery is built into any drive out there and
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the Windows standard is that you wait at
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once there's an error once the controller detects an error on the drive
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whether it's being read or written from the it should wait and it should try as
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many times as possible to recover that error before giving up on it so that's
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the desktop standard raid controllers work off a completely different standard
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and once the drive stops responding and is trying something like this for even a
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couple seconds at a time it'll drop it from the array so that's why consumer
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drives are not optimized for raid performance because what happens is once
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they run into some kind of a problem they'll try as long as they can to
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correct it which will drop them out of the array and makes them not ideal for
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raid or Nas or storage applications so
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red drives completely alleviate that these are using Enterprise grade
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Hardware but at a lower performance and lower power consumption level than the
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Enterprise drives because they're running at a lower spindle speed so they
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are using a highquality binning process which means these are 1 million hour
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meantime between failure drives they also come with a longer warranty than
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the standard desktop drives that's a three-year warrranty and what another
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part of the whole binning process that goes into these drives is the fact that
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they are optimized for multi-drive use so when you have one drive actually this
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drive is a perfect example because it's a 10K RPM drive when you have one drive
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sitting in a drive bay spinning around and the read heads are moving all over
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the place there's there's vibration no matter what there's always vibration you
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can't get away from it however when you take four drives and you pack them in
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tight next to each other and they're all vibrating you can run into problems
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because the vibration from the one drive and the that's above and the vibration
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from the drive below and if you have a bigger enclosure potentially the ones on
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the left and the right can make this drive like moving around like this so WD
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red drives in the binning process have much much tighter regulation in terms of
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the amount of vibration that's allowed while the spindle spinning and while the
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read heads and right while the heads are moving around inside the drive that
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means they are beside ID being more reliable and running cooler they are
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less likely to cause interference with the other drives around them next
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compatibility WD actually validates the drives outright with many Nas enclosures
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including this exact one which I keep pulling up because this is the one that
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I'm going to be installing these drives in and testing them in and WD is using
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not only at the chipset level but also at the finished goods level with guys
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like qaps andology to ensure that if you buy an AZ and you put WD red drive in it
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it'll work period if you guys have ever run into a RAID controller or enclosure
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compatibility issue in the past you know what I'm talking about sometimes they
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don't work and sometimes the not working isn't as simple as not detecting
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outright sometimes the not working is more like it works for a while and then
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stops working so that's uh that's you know much much much bigger of a problem
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um I think that pretty much covers
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everything I wanted to say about it for now so in summary it costs a little bit
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more than a consumer Drive performs a little bit less than an Enterprise Drive
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however you're going to run into a bottleneck at the controller or gigabit
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Ethernet level you know if you're running multiple drives long before
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you're going to run into a bottleneck at the 5400 RPM Drive stage um it has a
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longer warranty comes with 247 phone support So you can call WD anytime and
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it is pretty much the perfect drive for
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storage applications for the general consumer and that is why people are so
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excited about this drive right now thank you for checking out this unboxing and
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first look online as Tech tips and don't forget to subscribe