MS Windows Home Server

WD Red HDD Review and Availability

With the earlier announcement of the Western Digital Red hard drives for NAS, retailer newegg now have them available.

The 1TB model is listed as $109.99 which is .99 cents more than the MSRP whilst the 2TB and 3TB models are both $10 cheaper than MSRP being at $129.99 and $179.99 respectively. Also our friends at PC Perspective were able to get hold of the 3TB model and have given it a thorough testing.

The WD Red was tested alongside all three flavours of the Caviar Green (6Gb/sec, 3Gb/sec, and the AV-specific one meant for DVRs), the Caviar Black and the enterprise grade RE4-GP and RE4. The 1TB VelociRaptor was also included for some high-end perspective.

In their review they take a peek inside at the internals of the drive  as well as detailing the specs and of course a lot of testing:

“…I see the Red becoming the defacto standard for all bulk storage array applications. Given the recent push towards the home NAS concept, I think a bunch of folks are going to start seeing Red everywhere (in a good way).”

And so do we – You can find the PC Perspective review of the WD Red here.

The Home Server Show Podcast Episode 189

Episode 189 of The Home Server Show podcast is up, and this week:

“John, Jim, and Dave are back together for the Microsoft news that has eliminated the very product this podcast started for. Will Windows Home Server live on? We have thoughts on that as well as a lot of news, a Synology Beta, and Western Digital is seeing Red.”

You can find the audio for episode 189 here or view the video below:

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.

Protecting User Files with File History

The Building Windows 8 Blog have a post on Protecting user files with File History:

“Backing up your critical files is something we all know we should do. Even with everything in SkyDrive, it is still something we need to do. With Windows 8, we took a new look at the way backup can work and set out to solve the perennial problem of not just restoring all your files but restoring a previous version of a critical file you have been editing through the course of a day. To achieve this, we’re introducing a new feature in Windows 8, File History.”

File History will naturally be in the upcoming Windows Server 2012 Essentials and this is a great read to bring you up to speed with the technology, which also includes a video too.

You can find it here.