Conclusion, Pricing, and Thoughts
Conclusion:
PROS:
- Outstanding performance from the Red Pro line, on-par with enterprise units.
- Quiet, vibration free operation.
- Great sequential read and write speeds.
- Supported in 8-bay (Red) and 16-bay (Red Pro) configurations.
- 3-Year (Red) / 5-year (Red Pro) warranty with 24/7 support hotline.
CONS:
- 6TB Red could not be properly evaluated due to a firmware issue we discovered early in our evaluation of the drive.
Pricing and Availability:
Intro MSRP's are as follows:
Red (new higher capacities only):
- 3.5" 6TB: $299 ($0.050/GB)
- 3.5" 5TB: $249 ($0.050/GB)
Red Pro (all introduced capacities):
- 3.5" 4TB: $259 ($0.065/GB)
- 3.5" 3TB: $199 ($0.066/GB)
- 3.5" 2TB: $159 ($0.080/GB)
Note that these are intro MSRP's and will likely come down a bit once they are on the market for a bit (this especially applies to the Red Pro, which is currently priced above the street price of the equivalent WD SE).
Warranty:
Red: Standard Western Digital 3-year Warranty (plus 24/7 support hotline specific to Reds)
Red Pro: Western Digital 5-year Warranty (plus 24/7 support hotline specific to Reds)
Final Thoughts:
It's great to see Western Digital expand the capacities of the Red all the way up to 6TB. The upgraded NASware 3.0, extending support to NAS devices up to 8-bays is also a welcome addition. An additional bonus was the new Red Pro line, which is essentially high performance enterprise internals hiding under a red label – supported in arrays of up to 16 drives thanks to hardware vibration compensation. The Red Pro performed extremely well in our tests, but a firmware configuration bug present in the 5TB and 6TB Reds prevented us from seeing the full potential of those new higher capacities. We are expecting a firmware fix from Western Digital in the very near future, and will revisit the 6TB Red results at that time.
I'm awarding Gold to the Red Pro for delivering enterprise-level performance under a lower-cost and more consumer friendly label. The jury is still out on the 5TB and 6TB Red until we can re-test on updated firmware for those models.
I am a capitalist. I do not
I am a capitalist. I do not use red drives!!! lol!
Then buy a purple drive, you
Then buy a purple drive, you fairy 😛
If you ain’t black, you ain’t
If you ain’t black, you ain’t crap.
Don’t be mean, buy Green.
Don’t be mean, buy Green.
Good to know these are
Good to know these are affordable. I’ve still got about a year before I run out of space using 4TB REDs, then I’ll start upgrading with 6TB drives. I tried Seagate’s NAS drives but the one’s I bought (at least) were way too loud for use at home.
3TB is still the best $/GB at
3TB is still the best $/GB at $0.043/GB. Better density for the NAS drives, though not sure the price is worth it.
No. 5TB Seagate externals
No. 5TB Seagate externals are $190. $0.038/GB. I can’t buy them fast enough!
I think your failure premise
I think your failure premise is a bit contrived. No one should be running a RAID system of any type without full SMART checks on a regular basis at the very least.
I’ve personally had RAIDs
I've personally had RAIDs fail in that scenario even with SMART checks in place, as well as weekly full array data scrubs. Fact is that unless you have some form of TLER, a second drive failure that occurs mid rebuild will cause most RAID controllers to offline the array.
Ryan had also had such a failure (using Seagate drives), and I had to recover his array by imaging the non-failed drives and manually de-striping in software.
Curious Allyn, which imaging
Curious Allyn, which imaging software did you use to rescue that array ???
It wasn’t the imaging
It wasn't the imaging software that did the rescue – all it did was create images of the drives (and read past the unreadable areas after hours of timeouts / retries). One I had the images, I coded something myself to re-stitch, using alternating parity (i.e. two drives had unreadable sectors in (mostly) alternating areas relative to each other).
That was for my array recovery. Ryan's was easier, as he had just one drive with a small cluster of bad sectors causing his array to timeout. I was able to image that drive and re-stitch that array back together with a tool from Runtime Software – but with some custom settings I had to come up with myself, as Ryan's array was not easy for that software to 'lock' onto in auto mode.
So the pro is “better” &
So the pro is “better” & expected to last longer, yet is 6dBA LOUDER than the standard WD RED….
Also, did anyone else notice they changed the “Non-recoverable read errors per bits” to look better despite being the same?
It’s a 7200 RPM enterprise
It's a 7200 RPM enterprise spec drive. *Of course* it is faster / louder.
You should look into how
You should look into how Seagate is intentionally crippling consumer HDDs with low APM states and special firmware to scare enterprise customers into buying more expensive drives.
Can we mix and match Green
Can we mix and match Green and Red drives?
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always i used to read smaller articles that also clear
their motive, and that is also happening withh this post which I am reading now.
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Hi I’ve got 3 existing 1year
Hi I’ve got 3 existing 1year old WD RED 4TB drives and am moving to a new Synology 1515plus. I’d like to expand my storage and am considering a RED PRO instead of buying another standard 4TB RED drive
My question is this, is it bad to mix a new 4TB RED PRO with the older 4TB standard RED drives in a RAID?
Thanks in advance
I have almost the same
I have almost the same question, except i have 5 x one year old wd red 3tb’s and am expanding to 8 drives…Would it be better to use 3 new pro drives, or stick with 3 new standard red drives?
Thanks in advance.
oh, and by the way…..Merry Christmas to all on here!
Pro drives would be your best
Pro drives would be your best bet, since they have accelerometers in like the Se drives to actively reduce vibration. Though even the newer plain reds have nasware 3.0 and so have software based vibration reduction, allowing upto 8 drives.
WD have also said they will honour warranties of those using older (1-5 bay drives) in 8 bay configs.
Perhaps on cost, plain reds would be better, don’t forget the red pro isn’t a home NAS drive, it’s louder, faster, and uses more power (around 5w/drive more), designed for heavier use.