Western Digital reveals NAS storage drive

ZDNet reports.

Western Digital's (WD) Red is one of those drives. The 3.5-inch SATA drive is designed from the bottom up for NAS devices, which have unique demands not shared by the average hard drive set-up.

The Red drives look like normal, 3.5-inch hard drives (only parts of the label are red), and they will initially come in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities, Geek.com writes.

Each drive will have a 64MB cache, DDR2, WD's Intellipower rotational speed moderation, and 6Gbitps SATA. Sounds just like a normal 3.5-inch drive, right? In most ways, they are, but each Red disk will have WD's NASware RAID management as well as firmware and hardware improvements that make them ideally suited to work in small, 1-5 bay enclosures.

PC World New Zealand says three major hardware changes define the WD Red series: Cache has been upgraded from the DDR RAM found in WD's existing drives, to doubly-fast DDR 2 RAM, increasing transfer speeds.

During manufacture, a new '3D active balance' process improves platter balancing within the drives, reducing vibration during drive use. This, in turn, leads to reduced heat generation and noise, valuable in multi-drive NAS set-ups.

Finally, new 'NASware' firmware is optimised for use with NAS devices, rather than the desktop PCs existing consumer drives are designed for.