WD RED: Possible refresh soon?

[urbanracer34]

So I've been in the market to build a server, and I had the part list ready to go except, how I was going to stock the thing with DATA drives?

I wanted to go $200 MAX per 4TB drive, and I settled on the WD RED series. Checked yesterday and it said it could only do 1-5 in a NAS, my server will be maxed out at 8 drives in the bays.

Today I go check for hard drive prices again using pcpartpicker (highly recommend them) and WD RED 4TB stood out to me.
But not for the price...

According to the NEWEGG.CA page, it says they support 1-8 in a NAS and they have NASWARE 3.0 inside.

Yet when I go check WD's site, it says they support 1-5 in a NAS and have NASWARE 2.0 inside.

Does this mean there's a refresh coming for RED drives?! I think so!

 

[Clownius]

How can a drive change the ability of a NAS to support multiple drives?

To me it just looks like a recommendation on the scale you would look at WD Reds as your drive of choice.

 

[Chuckleb]

We run hundreds of these drives in our storage farms, don't worry too much. I think NASware is probably more marketing jargon than anything else. Actually they use it to define features. Some forums talk about how you are able to update firmware on some.

 

[Diavuno]

yup, just marketing to push the enterprise line of RE's

 

[mervincm]

looks like maybe the warranty is being boosted as well?

 

[cheezehead]

Refresh announced this morning. July 21, 2014-WD® Expands NAS Storage Offerings with 6 TB, 5-Platter Hard Drive Featuring Industry-Leading Areal Density

MSRP Pricing:
Red 6 TB (model #: WD60EFRX) is $299.00
Red 5 TB (model #: WD50EFRX) is $249.00
Red Pro 4 TB (model #: WD4001FFSX) is $259.00
Red Pro 3 TB (model #: WD3001FFSX) is $199.00
Red Pro 2 TB (model #: WD2001FFSX) is $159.00

 

[Chuckleb]

Cool, I saw that too. I have to keep this in mind for our next disk refresh, the 4TB/$145 white label is still cheaper than this if I can spare the rack density/power/heat.

 

[Patrick]

Yea I posted this morning the release. Happy to get something up the day I am back.

The Red Pro I have a sneaky suspicion is is a RE rebrand.

 

[HellDiverUK]

The Red Pro I have a sneaky suspicion is is a RE rebrand.

Red is a rebadged Green, Red Pro is a rebadged RE.

That said, I quite like the RE drives, I've had a few over the years and they're solid albeit warm and noisy. Still got 4x2TB RE running in a Microserver NL40 at work as a Backup2Disk destination (running NAS4Free as an iSCSI target).

Patrick, do you know if the Greens are still 5900rpm, or have they cranked the spindle speed up to 6600rpm (some review of the 3TB Green I found on the web seemed very sure the Greens were now 6600rpm, which to me would say the Red is that also, which would be possibly why performance of the Red is a little higher than one might expect).

 

[RyC]

What's the purpose of rebadging? The MSRP of the Red Pro's seems high enough where it's not that much more just to go for the RE's

 

[HellDiverUK]

It's finding new markets for the same old stuff. Take the RE4 that's a bit long in the tooth, slap on a fancy Red Pro sticker, hey-presto you've got a queue of people lining up to buy 'the new shiny'.

 

[HellDiverUK]

All signs point to the Mini receiving a refresh soon with the new Intel Haswell processors, something that isrumored to happen across all the Macs sometime this year

Yeah. Perhaps when you try spamming your plumbing business, thinly disguised as replies, you could actually read the thread and reply with something relevant. Dumbass.