Western Digital 2.5″ Red 1TB NAS HDD Review

Introduction

Launched just over a year ago, Western Digital’s Red line of drives, along with an easier to understand product line-up (Greed, Blue, Black and so on) have changed the way that many consumers look at their storage. The Red drives are built primarily for a NAS (Network Attached Storage) environment, but they are also suited for SOHO users who want drives that will deliver enterprise class performance but without the hefty price tag that the higher class of drive tends to come with.

With network storage becoming more of a common entity outside of the enterprise sector, for example in homes and offices, the Red line of drive have delivered enterprise class features and reliability with their three-year warranty for users with one to five bay NAS systems as typically seen in the SOHO and SMB sector where these drives are targeted.

As the density of storage has gone up we’ve seen the Red drives reach up to a whopping 4TB in a 3.5″ format, but with users wanting more compact systems, WD had to think ahead of the game and this leads us to the 2.5″ versions that we now also have on offer today. Offering up either 750GB or 1TB of storage each, the 2.5″ drives run with a, Intellipower spindle speed of 5400RPM and with 16MB of cache on a SATA 6Gbps interface, they are rated to handle a workload of 120-150TB of data per year, which for the most part is well over the data throughput that most small businesses will ever put their drives through.