News Western Digital announces Red NAS drive family

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/07/11/wd-red-nas-drives/1

 

Maybe I'll soon replace my Caviar Green inside my Synology

 

Hmm. Building a HTPC soon. Now I have to decide between Green and Red.

 

^^ and 90% of raid is really software run on the cpu anyway

 

While it'll be interesting to see if there's any large performance difference I'm willing to bet pricing will dictate the success of these drives for more discerning buyers.

The Green drives of equal size can be had for up to $20 less than the given prices for the Red drives. If there's no real great benefit I can see people saving a bit by going with Greens anyway. If you're looking at both a NAS and backup for said NAS you could save enough money to buy an entire hard drive...

Looking at Newegg, 1TB Red is $109 as stated, 2TB is $129 being a bit less than stated, and 3TB is $179 again a bit less than stated. It should also be noted that these prices don't include the $7 shipping which the Green drives get for free.

What are the chances of getting a NAS/home server How To/Tips and Tricks?

 

Gareth? you up for it? would happily guinea pig it as i want to (re)build a home server

 

Given the recent news about WHS being dropped and the replacement costing $400+ I think Linux and BSD (such as FreeNAS) are what most readers would be wanting to see anyway!

 

Please include OpenMediaVault in any comparison, it is fantastic (coming from a ex-FreeNAS user).

Sent from my HTC Desire S using Tapatalk 2

 

+rep - cant wait tbh , ` eejuts guide to linux nas` is really what most people actually want ; a `how to turn an old pc into something useful again - for free`

and thats the sort of writing your awesome at

 

Another vote for OpenMediaVault, it's as least as easy to install as XP, if not easier. Just pop a cd or USB key in, boot from it and follow the instructions.

 

One of the main advantages to the Red drives is that are designed to run continuously i.e. 24/7, whereas most consumer drives are not (typically 2,400 hours per year or 8 hours per day, 5 days per week).

 

Oooh, Gareth, teach we poor Windows power users exactly how the hell you're supposed to compile and install BSD.

I've got a 1TB Green drive currently...not a big fan. I always feel like it's on the verge of failure, especially when it's put itself to sleep and takes forever to respond. When it does that, I just wait in dread to hear the "click...click....click". There's a firmware fix that stops it from putting itself to sleep after 5 seconds, but after I had all my important data on it, I didn't want to update for fear of bricking it.

For the minor difference in power, relatively, I'll stick with 'normal' 7200 rpm drives. Although I inadvertently recommended a WD A/V drive to a friend and he's perfectly happy with it.

I'm still wating for prices to come back down - it's way too painful to shell out $140 for a 2TB drive when I paid $80 for one a little more than a year ago. That did kind of tear it for me, though; prices have come down to the point where my next drive will be an SSD. When I checked Newegg for an 80GB (needed a cheap boot drive), it was $99.99. When I can pick up a 128GB SSD for not much more than that, HDDs start to become stupid for anything less than a TB to be used for mass storage.

 

In my opinion, WD Red drives are WD RE4-GP with following modifications :
- no green sleep thingy (aka spindown after 8 seconds)
- less warranty

I had bunch of WD Green drives to fail, but except one WD20EARX they all were the first WD20EARS drives (WD20EARS-00S, 4 platter version). All WD20EARS-00M (3 platter version) and all but one WD20EARX are working fine.

Sure, in future i will buy red drives probably for my fileserver, if they won't be stupidly overpriced. But if they will be more expensive than Blue, then i will just buy Blue drives. Seagate (and because of that Samsung too now) is banned in my house .

 

"Until now, customers had to choose between using desktop or high-end server drives for their home or small office NAS systems – neither of which were both cost effective for consumer solutions and fully NAS compatible"

Hmm, wonder what's wrong with enterprise grade RE4? Time Limited Error Recovery on them should stop the RAID controller dumping them because they're unresponsive.

Actually, doesn't the RE4 stand for “RAID Edition”?

 

Good to know - last time I looked into it, I couldn't find binaries of BSD (FreeBSD, as I recall), so I was left with attempting to compile it myself, and documentation was a bit lacking for someone who had never attempted to compile an OS. I'll have to check it out next time the Windows install on my server craps out.

 

Then you were looking wrong ?
http://web.archive.org/web/19961221025901/http://www.freebsd.org/where.html

That is the FreeBSD download site from 1996. Don't let the wording "The official sources for FreeBSD are:" confuse you .