WD Red: For NAS only?

[tallen234]

I just bought the Western Digital Red 3TB hard drive for my Dell XPS 435t/9000 as a second drive for media. I just realized that the red is "designed" for NAS systems. Can I use this as a "regular" hard drive? If yes, am I losing anything over another similarly situated "regular" hard drive? I can return it quite easily (it is still in the box).

Thanks

P.S. I am running Windows 7 64-Bit Pro

 

[kitsunestarwind]

They work fine as a regular HDD
difference between normal and RED (nas) drives is Price and some Hardware level error correction stuff for raid solution

 

[confish21]

Was just looking at these. Yeah there just fine. And really there better than WD greens so the price was right in my book.

btw, Fahk seagate

cheers!

 

[tallen234]

Thanks for the replies. Since I am only going to use it for storing media files, I figure the additional 1TB of storage is better than the performance associated with the WD Black (and its 2TB).

 

[tallen234]

Best answer selected by tallen234.

 

[Ed Toussieh]

They work fine as a regular HDD
difference between normal and RED (nas) drives is Price and some Hardware level error correction stuff for raid solution

RED drives also run at 5400 RPM, have 3 year warranty and lower MTBF ratings from the enterprise drives (7200 RPM, 5 year warranty and higher MTBFs). Enterprise discs are more expensive but aside from other features, the increased speed and better warranty should make-up for their increased cost and they also include the time-limited error recovery (TLER) feature which is included in the RED drives.

See this table to compare features: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7258/battle-of-the-4-tb-nas-drives-wd-red-and-seagate-nas-hdd-faceoff/2
See