Why get WD Red drives for NAS RAID?

Thoric · Jun 13, 2016

I'm looking at getting an inexpensive 2-bay NAS system and RAIDing a pair of 3TB drives. I believe the original point of RAID was to take advantage of cheaper drives by implementing drive failure mitigation. In it's simplest form the data is stored on more than one physical drive such that a failure of one drive means the data is not lost. However, tt appears that we're being encouraged to pay a premium for NAS-optimised HDDs (WD Red, for example), when the point of RAID is to take advantage of the cheaper drives.

In short, my question is: Why should I pay extra for high reliability WD-Red drives when a RAID system is supposed to be safe with 'ordinary' drives?

slingsrat · Jun 13, 2016

More likely drives were less reliable when RAID 1 was popularised than it being a way to use cheap drives reliably. I have only had one sudden disk failure in 20 years and that was around 20 years ago. RAID 1 is all about protecting data so if you're serious I guess you would choose the most reliable drives.

Thoric · Jun 13, 2016

slingsrat :

I wish to use the NAS as a remote storage drive with protection, so that I don't need to backup to anything. The hope is that with RAID 1 a drive failure, no matter how unlikely, doesn't mean any loss of data. I can replace the drive and continue unaffected.

But if drives are so stable, why do we need Red vs Blue vs Purple vs Black etc.? Reading articles, all I see are tiny differences between access latency, read/write rates, power usage etc., but all so insignificant compared to the 12% difference in price between blue and red. What value are we buying when we choose Red over Blue? Anything tangible?

SuperSoph_WD · Jun 14, 2016

Welcome to the community, Thoric!

The WD Red drives are specifically designed for NAS/RAID environments and they incorporate different features when compared to regular desktop HDDs. Once of the differences is within the firmware of the drive. NASware 3.0 that is incorporated in the WD Reds is a technology that optimizes the drives by improving their performance and reliability.

Regular desktop drives are not optimized to withstand the workload of a NAS environment and have higher failure rate when put to the test. Here are some of the things we point out when describing the WD Red HDDs:

- Compatibility: Without being tested for compatibility with your NAS system, optimum performance is not guaranteed.
- Reliability: The always-on environment of a NAS or RAID is a hot one. And desktop drives aren't typically designed and tested in those conditions. WD Red is.
- Error recovery Controls: WD Red NAS hard drives are specifically designed with RAID error recovery control to help reduce failures within the NAS system. Desktop drives are typically not designed for RAID environments where this can be an issue.
- Noise and Vibration Protection: Designed to operate solo, desktop drives offer little or no protection from the noise and vibration faced in a multi-drive system. WD Red drives are designed for multi-bay NAS systems.

Using desktop drives in your computer system for consumer RAID applications is actually tested and recommended for RAID 0 or RAID 1 arrays. However, your network-attached system is an entirely different thing that would work 24/7. This is something that endangers your files' integrity and increases the risk of potential data loss, if its storage is configured with regular HDDs. Still, RAID is not a backup solution! Make sure you have at least two copies of your files stored in different locations! This is the surest way to avoid the data-loss headaches!

Hope this answers your question! Let me know if you have more!

SuperSoph_WD

Thoric · Jun 14, 2016

SuperSoph_WD :

Hi SuperSoph, and thanks for the welcome.

Your arguments are interesting, and I genuinely believe that the WD Red drives are better for NAS solutions than Blue drives. But I guess what confuses me the most is the concept of paying more for HDDs that are more reliable/solid/robust to then RAID them and halve their capacity for the benefit of having data loss protection. Reasoning that it's not a reliable backup solution (which I appreciate), then what's the point of RAIDing the better drives? Just get standard drives and RAID those, right? Or avoid RAID altogether perhaps? I like statistics, and I don't seem to be able to find real-world failure rates for drives these days.

For about £150 I can have about 3TB of RAIDed Blue storage, or for about £90 I can have one 3TB (non-RAIDed) Red drive with reduced failure rates. I don't think I'm sold on the idea of paying more for better drives to then RAID them for increased protection.

In the end I think I'll end up getting the Reds because I just know that if I buy Blues and one fails I'll be kicking myself about the cost of having to buy a replacement and wishing I'd gotten the Reds in the first place.

Similarly, I might avoid RAIDing them, get one 3 TB instead of two and sign up to a cloud based backup service. Thus if the drive fails I can recover from the net. Afterall, I don't wish to backup everything on them, just maybe 500GB worth. The rest can be lost without too much concern.

Thanks for the discussion!

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