Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at Western Digital red series hard drives so this is a five pack that actually only has four drives in it for a very specific reason and I am extremely excited about these drives and this hard drive packaging you look at this it's like see it's flat pack and then it comes with perforation so you can fold it which makes it fit perfectly in this delightful little box sorry guys I get I get pretty excited about packaging these things you know packages really get me excited so we've got four three terabyte WD red drives so what is a red Drive let's start with a little bit of history of WD and their whole Drive colors thing I'm actually going to take it out of the anti-static bag so cameraman can actually see the drive so back in the day it was just WD caviar these days we have three well from now four but we had three different colors so we had black which is high performance we had blue which is a balance between performance and power consumption and as well as saving a couple bucks versus the black drives and then we have green which is optimized for storage and energy efficiency and then they've also got velociraptors as well but that's sort of it's like black on steroids so let's call it that 10,000 rpm so this is all all the consumer three and a half inch drives okay so where does where does red fit into this red is for NASA and store oh right there's sorry there's Ari of course as well which is the premium enterprise level drives so WD hasn't really had a drive in the past that is optimized and and with with the perfect firmware and the perfect hardware solution for consumer storage so they had our II which was optimized for enterprise or business storage but was very expensive so so many consumers were running out and buying consumer-level green or black drives or Blu drives and putting them into these nas and closures or putting them into raid arrays and there because they wanted to build themselves a workstation on the cheap and they need like a high-performance storage solution for video editing or whatever else and what was happening was due to the way that consumer desktop drives handle error recovery so error recovery is built into any drive out there and the windows standard is that you wait at once there's an error once the controller detects an error on the drive whether it's being read or written from the it should wait and it should try as many times as possible to recover that error before giving up on it so that's the desktop standard raid controllers work off a completely different standard and once the drive stops responding and is trying something like this for even a couple seconds at a time it'll drop it from the array so that's why consumer drives are not optimized for raid performance because what happens is once they run into some kind of a problem they'll try as long as they can to correct it which will drop them out of the array and makes them not ideal for raid or Nazz or storage applications so red drives completely alleviate that these are using enterprise grade hardware but at a lower performance and lower power consumption level than the enterprise drives because they're running at a lower spindle speed so they are using a high quality binning process which means these are 1 million our mean time between failure drives they also come with a longer warranty than the standard desktop drives that's a 3-year warranty and what another part of the whole bidding process that goes into these drives is the fact they are optimized for multi drive use so when you have one drive actually this drives a perfect example because it's a 10k rpm Drive and you have one drive sitting in a drive bay spinning around and the read heads removing all over the place there's there's vibration no matter what there's always vibration you can't get away from it however when you take four drives and you pack them in tight next to each other and they're all lie braiding you can run engine problems because the vibration from the one drive and the that's above and the vibration from the drive below and if you have a bigger enclosure potentially the ones on the left and the right can make this Drive like moving around like this so WD red drives in the bidding process have much much tighter regulation in terms of the amount of vibration that's a out while the spindle spinning and while the read heads and write our out while the heads are moving around inside the drive that means they are besides being more reliable and running cooler they are less likely to cause interference with the other drives around them next compatibility WD actually validates the drives outright with many nas and closures including this exact one which I keep pulling up because this is the one that I'm going to be installing these drives in and testing them in and WD is using not only at the chipset level but also at the finished goods level with guys like Hugh naps and ology to ensure that if you buy an as and you put a WD red drive in it it'll work period if you guys have ever run into a RAID controller or enclosure compatibility issue in the past you know what I'm talking about sometimes they don't work and sometimes the not working isn't as simple as not detecting outright sometimes the not working is more like it works for a while and then stops working so that's a that's you know much much much bigger of a problem um I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about it for now so in summary it costs a little bit more than a consumer drive performs a little bit less than an enterprise Drive however you're going to run into a bottleneck at the controller or Gigabit Ethernet level you know if you're running multiple drives long before you're going to run into a bottleneck at the 5400 rpm drive stage it has a longer warranty comes with 24/7 phone support so you can call WD anytime and it is pretty much the perfect drive for storage applications for the general consumer and that is why people are so excited about this drive right now thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look online is tech tips and don't forget to subscribe