Western Digital 2.5″ Red 1TB NAS HDD Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Like their full sized 3.5″ counterparts, the 2.5″ drives both come in with a good price point for their size. With prices ranging from around £60 to just over £160 for the 3.5″ 1-4TB drives and the 2.5″ drives coming in at around £60 for the 750GB model and just under £70 for the 1TB model, the pricing is very well matched for the capacities available. Naturally with the pricing so close on the 2.5″ drives, the 1TB drive is by far, the best value out of the two.

Overview

As I mentioned right back at the start of this review, Western Digital’s Red line of drives have made vast improvements in SOHO and SMB storage arrays giving them the performance and reliability that they need but on a scale that doesn’t carry the same price tags that the enterprise class drives bring with them.

With more and more users wishing to scale down the physical size of their storage and a number of home users catering their own media servers, drives like this are ideal for the job with their low power consumption, dense storage capability, better vibration tolerance and a life span that is far greater than their standard desktop counterparts such as the mid-range Blue line of drives.

Comparing this drive to it’s bigger 3.5″ sibling, there are only two real differences to be had, the first is a slower spindle speed of 5400RPM instead of 7200RPM and a much smaller cache of only 16MB instead of 64MB. Whilst it would be nice to see a slightly larger cache, by the time we take into account that these drives are likely to be used in a RAID5 array (the typical array of choice for SOHO and SMB users) and the fact that Gigabit Ethernet has a theoretical limit of around 130MB/s, then this performance bottleneck from a single drive is soon eliminated.

With a three-year warranty and a desirable price tag to suit, both for the 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives. Anyone who is looking for a 1-5 disk RAID array should really be looking towards these drives for their storage needs.

Pros:

• Built for NAS
• 3 year warranty
• Enterprise features and reliability
• Low power usage
• 1m hour MTBF
• Desirable price

Cons:

• 16MB buffer

“Years of experience has made Western Digital one of the leading manufacturers in desktop and enterprise storage. Their Red line of drives have also proven that they are willing to give the general consumer a drive with enterprise level features and with a new set of 2.5″ drives to now add to their portfolio, its clear they will cover every angle to cater for the consumers growing needs.”

Thanks to Western Digital for providing us with this review sample