WD Introduces Red Drives for NAS Systems

Western Digital introduced the new series of Red hard drives on Wednesday. The hard drives are specifically intended for NAS systems with one to five drive bays, which are often used in small businesses or home offices.

With the Red series, Western Digital wants to capitalize on the NAS drive market, so customers no longer have to choose between desktop drives or high-end server drives for their small business or home office NAS system. The hard drives in the Red series are equipped with NASware, firmware that the manufacturer has specially developed for NAS systems. According to the manufacturer, this firmware offers high reliability, better performance and less downtime.

The manufacturer expects major growth in the market for NAS drives. Western Digital quotes John Rydning, vice president of hard drive research at IDC. “The small-scale network attached storage market will experience a compound annual growth rate of 86.2 percent in 2011-2016,” Rydning said.

Three models will be available in the Red series. The WD10EFRX has 1TB of storage space and will cost 99.90 euros. The WD20EFRX has 2TB of storage space and has a suggested retail price of 129.90 euros. Finally, the WD30EFRX has 3TB and will cost 189.90 euros. All drives are equipped with a SATA 600 interface and have 64 MB cache. In idle mode, the drives use 3.2W, 4.1W and 4.1W respectively, while reading and writing they use 3.7W, 4.4W and 4.4W respectively. Also, the drives are relatively quiet; the manufacturer has measured that the drives produce an average of 24 dBA during the search.