Over the years the need for more storage has exploded. I have seen systems with 750GB drive packed with pictures, MP3s and movies not to mention actual work files. It has become borderline ridiculous. Still we need to have better access to more space to store our stuff. To help with this many companies have begun manufacturing network attached storage devices. These are multi-drive products that can be connected to a home or small business network and used as a central spot for file storage. We have covered a couple of them and have a few more to show you in the future. The problem with many of these is that to keep costs down they are often shipped without drives. Many think that they can just buy a bunch of drives of the same size and throw them in. That does not always work though; we have run into a few cases where the NAS device did not work with a single range of drives or need a certain firmware revision to work with the drives. It becomes a frustrating game of finding the right drives to work with your NAS and also to get the best performance out of it. To help with this Western Digital have come up with a line of disk drives that are designed specifically to work with NAS devices. These are their new WD Red Drives. The WD Red Drives will come in 1-3TB sizes and should fall into line between the WD Green and Black Drives in terms of performance and price. Western Digital has sent us three of their WD Red 2TB drives for us to try out in two of the NAS devices we have here, so let’s see how they do.
The Western Digital WD-RED Drives -The new WD Red drives are basically traditional magnetic platter media. They have the same moving parts as your average drive and use SATA 3.0 for their interface after that, things get a little more interesting in terms of how they are put together. One of the first items that we noticed when looking over the specifications of the WD Red drives was the move from DDR to DDR2 for their on-drive cache.
In most drives today you will find that they use DDR because of its lower latency (even though it has a slower overall speed). The move to DDR2 does bring in new technology, but we do wonder about the higher latency times versus the frequency of the memory used. Hopefully the two will not conflict.
WD has more refinements than just dropping in 64MB of DDR2. They have also adjusted the drive spin speeds through the use of a component of their firmware called Intellipower Advanced Format. This allows the drive to dynamically adjust the spindle speed for the best balance of performance and power draw. Power efficiency is one of the key features of the Red series especially as they are meant to operate in configurations where you have more than one drive in close proximity to the others. The way Western Digital sees it the more efficient the drives are the less heat they will generate and the longer their life (which makes power extremely important).
Outside of the power draw most drives also heat up due simply to friction and the moving parts that are in them. To help combat this part of the equation WD has added in their 3D Balance feature into all of their Red drives. This feature helps to keep the platters balanced during their rotation along all three axes of movement. This balancing not only helps to keep things cool, but also helps to reduce the power used (the less friction due to vibration the less power needed to spin at a certain RPM) as well as noise from the spinning platters (if you have ever heard the old 10,000 RPM SCSI Drives they could really make a racket). This balancing also helps to prevent accidental contact with the platters by the read/write heads. All of these features combine into what WD is calling NASware. The purpose of NASware is to tailor the WD Red drives specifically to the needs of Network Attached Storage devices. WD is doing this by working to adjust the way that traditional SATA drives handle errors (they have adopted a method similar to what SAS drives use) so that you do not have a drive drop out of your RAID set due to error recovery. In addition to better error recovery they have also included features to help prevent data loss in the event of a power failure by adjusting the drive to use commit the last command in process before powering parking the heads to prevent damage to the platters. Other components of NASware include improved streaming support, Smart Command Transport, Improved seek times, improved power management support and a more accurate temperature sensing mechanism (accurate to within 1c).All of these are intended to make the WD Red drives perfect for the small and cramped enclosures that you end up with in a NAS device.
