WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Drive Review

[kzinti1]

Since you didn't list the Yellow RE Edition HDD's, are these Reds supposed to be replacing them?
I've been using the Yellow RE HDD's ever since they became available for any of my primary HDD's in all of my builds and have yet to have any failure using them either singly or in RAID.
Can the Red Editions be used singly or just in RAID? I don't recall this ever being mentioned, but (unfortunately), I'm a self-taught speed-reader and may have scanned right over any such statement.
I just skimmed through the NewEgg customer reviews and these drives are shown as being just as unreliable as any other HDD's from any manufacturer.
Do most people just not know how to properly use a HDD or are they really mechanically unreliable?
I've read umpteen reviews where the fault supposedly lies with NewEgg's extremely poor shipment packaging and the HDD's they sell just can't handle being bounced around during shipment and thus have a high failure rate because of this.
I suppose I've just been lucky to have only had one drive that was DOA out of the dozens I've bought, mainly from NewEgg but also other places whenever found as being cheaper.

[Apoptosis]

Since you didn't list the Yellow RE Edition HDD's, are these Reds supposed to be replacing them?
I've been using the Yellow RE HDD's ever since they became available for any of my primary HDD's in all of my builds and have yet to have any failure using them either singly or in RAID.
Can the Red Editions be used singly or just in RAID? I don't recall this ever being mentioned, but (unfortunately), I'm a self-taught speed-reader and may have scanned right over any such statement.
I just skimmed through the NewEgg customer reviews and these drives are shown as being just as unreliable as any other HDD's from any manufacturer.
Do most people just not know how to properly use a HDD or are they really mechanically unreliable?
I've read umpteen reviews where the fault supposedly lies with NewEgg's extremely poor shipment packaging and the HDD's they sell just can't handle being bounced around during shipment and thus have a high failure rate because of this.
I suppose I've just been lucky to have only had one drive that was DOA out of the dozens I've bought, mainly from NewEgg but also other places whenever found as being cheaper.

1) I asked WD about your RE question and will let you know what the say
2) yes, they can be used by themsevles and we have results of single drive use here - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2092/3/
3) AS for the Newegg reviews and people not knowing what they are doing... It's a bit of both. As for damaging a drive... I dropped one from 5 feet into the air while walking and it slammed into my wall corner first. I figured it would be dead, but it works fine. It hit hard enough to put a big dent in my drywall and there is paint on the black housing of the drive!
4) DOA drives are uncommon, but happen

[egloeckle]

3) AS for the Newegg reviews and people not knowing what they are doing... It's a bit of both. As for damaging a drive... I dropped one from 5 feet into the air while walking and it slammed into my wall corner first. I figured it would be dead, but it works fine. It hit hard enough to put a big dent in my drywall and there is paint on the black housing of the drive!

I totally missed the "while walking" part during the first read of this and was trying to figure out how gravity works in St Louis.

Horray for fridays, I need to start drinking apparently.

[Calamar]

Almost all my concerns about these beluga drives have been pointed out and answered.

Things are moving towards reFS or X-Raid, that aren't actually RAID structures but file systems that allow more than one disk units with redundancy. I think X-Raid its even a file system but its like FlexRAID a data management software. Problem of reFS comes with windows 8/2012 so we will have to wait and see "windows server 2012 R2" or the next one to see its truly potential. Its one of the strong points of W8, among EFS through SMB.
The fact is 3TB-4TB its a lot and the usual MTBF (10^6) for home use hasn't increased in the same speed sizes have done. F.e. a 2003 WD1200JB MTBF was 5*10^5.
Now we have 30 to 40 times bigger disks with only the double medium time before failure. Each disk you add to a RAID like 0 reduces it. Adding a spare at failure (RAID5) increases it, as RAID6 does. There are lots of articles that give you the math where the critical point is. Size vs. MTBF vs. Redundacy vs. Use vs. temp. Google has the best numbers (not the search engine! but the company itself).

As I see it, with +4TB drives, even if you use them to backup (given HHD are the cheapest GB/€ right now) use JBOD + a redundant file system (if you can detect disc degradation soon) or raid 1 (if you will only notice failure when its irreversible).

What MS had to understand many years ago is you should separate the OS features and its appearance. W8 features with W7 UI would have been a top seller! and those who wanted metro, they could download W8 UI. Enterprise and professionals like new and stable features, as long as you can still work as always. W8 has great features, great for NAS.

[egloeckle]

Except you are forgetting that ReFS is missing: named streams, quotas, EFS, hard links and other highly useful features with no suitable replacement. It may make storage 'easier' for the layman but it absolutely is not superior to NTFS. I would argue that except for the size limitations on NTFS that it combined with something like the thescus unit used in the review using iscsi is a far superior choice for most situations. Let the thescus handle the array and raid, keep your file system separate. This also ignores the fact that ReFS is not bootable to my knowledge, but that is another topic entirely.

[Bhench]

Can the Red Editions be used singly or just in RAID?

While you CAN use them as single drives, the features they implement to accelerate error recovery make them a bad choice over a Green or Black WD drive (or any other manufactures standard drive). With a stand alone drive it is set up to handle error correction internally so when it encounters a bad block it simply attempts to work around this and can take over 8 seconds to respond back to the RWTS in the OS. You see it as a short pause or freeze up. It has to do this because there is no other source of information to correct that data. However in a RAID this is a problem because an enterprise class RAID controller will see the 8 seconds of non-response and mark the whole drive as bad which then causes a rebuild. If you have a fat multi-terabit RAID this could take day(s) and significantly degrade the overall performance. To address this the HDD manufacturers developed protocols such as Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) which notify the RAID controller that the drive has a bad sector and the drive needs to perform error handling. Since the RAID controller is participating in this bi-direction communication it knows not to mark the entire drive out of service and start a rebuild. This allows the RAID to return data faster to the requester and use parity data (if required) to cover for the bad drive until it is able to retry its own error correction.

As a stand alone drive this means it will send out a TLER notification upon error discovery but nobody is listening. So the drive thinks the RAID controller is using parity data but there is no raid controller which can cause data corruption or OS hang ups while the drive tries to perform error recovery.

The main lesson here is that if you have a SOHO NAS that does NOT support TLER, these drives could be a waste of money. Most SOHO NAS boxes have their own error handling algorithms to work around the 8+ second response of a standard drive because they assume you are not putting enterprise class drives in a $200 - $300 NAS box. However, IF you have a NAS that talks TLER (Western Digital's NAS error protocol), Command Completion Time Limit (CCTL) from Samsung and Hitachi, or Error Recovery Control (ERC) from Seagate then NAS ready drives are awesome, but they are not meant for standalone aplications.
Bill