
WD's Red is the first line of NAS-specific hard drives - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/wds-red-are-the-first-nas-specific-hard-drives-20120710/
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jpadkins
It would probably be more accurate to say this is the first hard disk for NAS
_sold to a consumer market_.

All storage vendors sell NAS specific hard drives. Typically called
'enterprise SATA' or 'enterprise SAS'. They have similar enhancements as this,
but they work with the storage vendor to tune the firmware in the controller
to the expected workload pattern (vs. a general DAS workload)

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throwaway54-762
Tl;dr: WD claims: Higher-perf than its "green" line of hard drives (but not as
good as "black"), greater MTBF, lower power consumption than comparable
drives, rated for 10°F hotter conditions than previous WD offerings.

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jws
They are claiming the drives have a MTBF of 110 years as opposed to 75 years
for the greens. I think we can assume th rest is fiction too.

(I'm seeing a <5 year MTBF on greens.)

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yen223
How many have you tested?

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munkydung
hopefully this line doesn't use the 'advanced format' abomination

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shabble
Are you referring to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format>?

I'd not heard of it before, and a quick poke at the internet doesn't really
show anything beyond a move to 4k sectors (and therefore presumably less
efficient storage for lots of small files).

Is there something more I should know about? (in the market for a new home
storage box soonish)

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miahi
You get a huge performance impact if the OS doesn't align the clusters to the
sectors. From the wikipedia article:

 _The translation process is more complicated when writing data that is either
not a multiple of 4K or not aligned to a 4K boundary. In these instances, the
hard drive must read the entire 4,096-byte sector containing the targeted data
into internal memory, integrate the new data into the previously existing data
and then rewrite the entire 4,096-byte sector onto the disk media. This
operation, known as read-modify-write (RMW), can require additional revolution
of the magnetic disks, resulting in a perceptible performance impact to the
system user_

Most of the OSes correctly align the advanced format sectors.

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ars
You'll probably also need to partition it using the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table>

