INTRODUCTION

   There's no denying that the popularity of Network Attached Storage devices (or NAS Servers as i like to call them) has increased at such a degree over the past 3 years that even regular consumers purchase them for home use whether that's for downloading files from the internet or as media servers. However due to their design as complete closed systems there haven't really been many hardware components or peripherals released aimed especially at NAS servers but something tells me that this may change sooner rather than later. Western Digital was perhaps the first manufacturer to take a significant step towards providing special HDDs for use with NAS Servers featuring low temperatures, noise levels and power consumption without really sacrificing speed in the process. Well it did take quite a while for us to get one of these latest special HDD models that belong in the RED line but it was well worth the wait since we managed to secure the 2nd largest model available namely the 3TB variant.

   WD, a Western Digital company, is a long-time innovator and storage industry leader. As a storage technology pacesetter, the company produces reliable, high-performance hard disk drives and solid state drives. These drives are deployed by OEMs and integrators in desktop and mobile computers, enterprise computing systems, embedded systems and consumer electronics applications, as well as by the company in providing its own storage products. WD’s leading storage devices and systems, networking products, media players and software solutions empower people around the world to easily save, store, protect, share and experience their content on multiple devices. WD was established in 1970 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.wd.com.

   I must have used around 20 NAS serve models up until this day but i can't honestly say that I’ve ever run across any issues with any of the HDDs I’ve used with them whether those where was from Seagate, HGST, WD, Toshiba or Samsung the result was pretty much the same. However many people use NAS servers a lot differently than others and so although some use them for just a few hour per day purely as media and/or download servers others may use them around the clock to host personal pages or as Network Video Recorders (NVR). Naturally people who use NAS Servers a lot will always welcome HDDs that require less power to operate (thus lower electricity costs) while at the same time build lower temperatures than regular HDDs (let's not forget that temperatures may even affect the rest of the system). On top of that the latest Red drives by WD feature 3D Active Balance Plus technology, intelligent error recovery controls and command completion to offer optimal reliability and performance. All of the above features are part of WD's NASware 2.0 technology thus leaving very little room for doubt that their Red line of HDDs was developed solely for NAS Server use. Performance-wise the Red line of HDDs features WD's intellipower technology (much like their Green drives) which automatically sets the speed of the drive to anything between 5400 and 7200rpm (always according to the amount of workload) and a total of 64MB cache. Now as you can all understand testing some of the features found in the NASware 2.0 technology is not really possible in a review (such as error correction and reliability in general) we will however do our best to see how the Red line of HDDs does in terms of performance amongst other things.