WD Announce the Red Hard Drive Specifically for NAS

WD have announced their first hard drives specifically for NAS devices.

Designed for the always-on 1 to 5 bay NAS devices, these WD Red hard drives are now shipping in 3.5-inch 1 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB capacities for the home and small office user on the SATA 6 Gb/s interface with 64 MB of cache and IntelliPower RPM.

These WD Red drives feature:

• NASware™ technology, designed to improve reliability and system performance, reduce customer downtime and to simplify the integration process.
• 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology, which significantly improves the overall drive performance and reliability.
• Streaming support – NASware provides built-in compatibility with the ATA Streaming Feature Set which is important for AV storage applications such as Windows Media Center.
• SMART Command Transport (SCT) support – NASware allows monitoring and measuring of drive performance via the SMART command set. SMART can return data like thermal profiles, drive access statistics and more. NASware also delivers temperature accuracy within 1°C.
• Power management support – Enables optimized power usage within the NAS system.
• BIC Performance – Optimized seek to provide BIC performance while reducing the power and acoustics.
• Intelligent error recovery – With built in intelligent error recovery controls, NASware also prevents hard drives from being dropped off the RAID due to extended error recovery.  This provides more availability and less down time rebuilding the RAID. 
• Command completion – To further improve reliability, NASware minimizes the data corruption or loss in the event of an unexpected power loss by completing the command in process before shutting down.
• 3 year warranty

WD Red hard drives are available now with an MSRP of $109 for the WD Red 1 TB drive (model #: WD10EFRX), the 2 TB drive (model #: WD20EFRX) is $139 and the 3 TB drive (model #: WD30EFRX) is $189.

More information about WD Red hard drives can be found here, whilst a product overview PDF and a drive specification sheet (also in PDF) are also available.

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