Western Digital releases new "red" line harddisk for NAS'es

For those interested: Western Digital already had their Black, Blue and Green line of harddisks, but now they have Red as well. WD claims these drives contain special firmware, meant for optimal performance in combination with NAS'es. They say they have developed special "NASware" firmware. No idea what would make these disks more special than their other drives. (Maybe Mark can answer that one for us?) They come in 1, 2 or 3TB, are SATA600 and have 64MB of cache, so pretty average in my book.

Edit: you can find the first online review on the 3TB version of these disks here.

I haven't seen one yet, nor read anything other than the press release.

But my guesses are (1) perhaps these are the rebranded Hitachi drives we've been "waiting" for, and/or (2) they've limited media errors to something less than a 2-minute timeout, to make commercial NAS boxes happier.

EDIT: Oh, and I'll bet they finally changed the 8-second unload timeout to a more reasonable default value.

Cheers

That's my guess as well. I suppose you'll be able to test one of those sooner or later Mark? Would you mind sharing your findings with us when you do?

If/when I ever get hold of one here, I'll let y'all know what I discover about them.

But that could be a very long time from now, as I've only recently upgraded my storage to use WD 3TB Green drives. As has a buddy of mine who goes through drives like butter on a hot summer day. He's been a good source of test units for me in the past.

The biggest feature I'd be interested in from these is this:


All our 12 bay ReadyNAS units at work use the Western Digital enterprise drives which also deal with vibrations/noise better then the average desktop drive.

I guess they do that by making sure that all the 1's or all the 0's don't all end up on one side of the platter. Gotta keep things in balance. Hmmm... how much heavier are 1's than 0's anyway?



tanstaafl.

It can seem like snake oil, until you see the effect screaming has on hard drive performance...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Note that they don't actually say that they're doing anything special about it. Green drives are very low on noise and vibration already, and spin slowly enough that it's unlikely to be a concern.

Enterprise drives, spinning at 10000rpm and faster, suffer much more from vibration, and thus need the extra firmware workarounds.

Cheers

I just can't believe that WD is using the tag line "Red, for bloody murder" in advertising these products.

From the review:

May be marketing speak, but they seem to be doing something that they tend to skip on other drives.

It was my understanding that vibration becomes more and more of a problem as data density increases, due to the smaller and smaller data tracks on the platter (Hence why larger drives tend to appear first at lower RPM rates, and slowly become available in 7.2k, 10k and 15k varieties). Not enough to ever be a problem with just one drive, but more of an issue when 12 of these are bolted into an enclosure barley bigger then the drives. Most of the drive mounts I've seen out there lack any kind of damper to minimize transferring the vibrations into the rest of the chassis.

That's so awesome. I totally had to tweet that.

Again, I don't see where they say they're doing something special here that isn't already a standard firmware feature of their other drives.

Cheers

That is really cool. Talking to your plants may or may not help, but it's clear that screaming at your hard drives will hurt

I wonder if they are tuning the drives to run in sync — the way a pilot will synchronize the engines on a twin engine plane.

No. Synchronized angular velocity was a requirement of RAID2, but that's long gone.

It seems these Red drives do have an advantage over the regular Green drives. For one, they use platters of 1 TB density, so they're a good deal faster than the Greens. Also, 3D Active Balance Plus (a self-balancing technology) and NoTouch ramp load technology might make it worth it, together with the extra year of warranty. Thanks to its self-balancing technology, it's also the most silent drive WD has ever produced. About its only downside (apart from the somewhat higher price), is that it has been tuned to be less aggressive on head motions, which results in higher random access times. This is done op purpose because this drive is meant for bulk storage and silent operation. All this can be read in this review.

I was wondering Mark, since this drive does have TLER enabled, would it be a dumb idea to use one of these drives in a regular desktop system? Or would it be smarter to wait for WD to also start using 1TB platters in the Green drives. (to be honest, I like the idea of whisper quiet drives as well, and I doubt WD will ever use this 3D Active Balance Plus technlogy in their desktop line of drives).

So do the "Green" labelled versions. Don't they?


Nothing special there, other than the marketing-speak. They balance the platters on all of their drives, as do their (dwindling number of) competitors. Otherwise they'd be much more noisy and more prone to data errors. And the "no-touch ramp" thingie is a property of the Green drives too, and probably of all modern hard drives (not sure, but quite probably).


Along with the "Green" labelled versions of the exact same mechanisms?


All drives have "TLER enabled". The difference here is that the "Red L" implies a much smaller number than the 2-minute "L" of "Green" drives.


Dunno. If the "L" value is less than 20 seconds (likely), then yes.. it would be dumb to use it in a non-redundant situation. I prefer my drives to try HARD to recover from media errors (the opposite of what "TLER" implies).

These are either (1) Hitachi drives with WD firmware, or (2) Green "WD" drives with slightly different firmware and red coloured labels (not a bad thing).

Cheers

No. The Green drives still use 800 GB platters as far as I know. If you look at the graphs of the review I've linked to above. The Red 3TB drive seems to be about 20% faster than the Green 3TB drive, which can only be done by increasing platter density I think.


Ah, noted!


The cutoff value is usually 7 seconds, so that's not much. Longer than that and a normal raid controller will kick the drive from the array. I indeed also prefer my drives to try as hard as they can to recover from errors.

For unRAID, which I still plan on using, I don't think this will matter much because unRAID is not typical raid and I doubt TLER would offer much benefit. It probably doesn't, and as you've written above, using a disk with a low TLER value like 7 seconds is probably worse than having a disk try for up to two minutes before dropping out. So for unRAID, this disk is probaby not a good choice.
To me, it seems this TLER thing is only a marketing thing HD manufacturers have created so they would be able to sell 'enterprise type' HD's which cost double the price of normal drives. Only because these have TLER enabled (at 7 seconds) and a longer warranty period. It almost sounds like a scam to me, because I don't think there's any technological reason why RAID controller also couldn't try longer than 7 seconds to recover from errors. They could have also agreed on a mutual value like 20 or 30 seconds so everybody would be happy, but of couse, this would no longer distinguish the enterprise drives from the desktop drives and I believe that's the true reason behind the TLER story. Normally this would never have been a problem since the consumer market and corporate market are usually separted well enough. But in this case, with NAS'es become increasingly popular, *is* a problem. One they created on purpose.

I'm not entirely sure, but I believe I've read somewhere these disks were the first result of the incorporation of Hitachi. Of course I don't know what this means exactly, which parts of Hitachi technology they started using and which parts they did not. In any case they did more effort than Seagate who just started selling Samsung drives with a Seagate sticker on them. These drives were easily identifyable as Samsung because of their particular design.

Cheers!

Mmm.. yeah, according to Anandtech the WD "Green" branded 3TB drives use/used 750GB/platter.

Hitachi was using 1TB/platter, and spinning some drives at 5900rpm rather than 5400rpm. So those would have faster sequential bit transfer rates to/from the platters.

"TLER" is supposed to be a simple firmware toggle, changeable at run-time by standard ATA commands. Some drive vendors did it that way, but WD decided to make it a proprietary thing so they could differentiate otherwise identical drives.

Pricing the "TLER-enabled" ones ("RAID edition") at a premium, and then using overly long timeouts (2 minutes??) in the non-TLER versions just to help "encourage" people to pay the premium.

Again, the standards for SATA/ATA always used to mandate a 30-second maximum timeout.. not 2-minutes.

Bastardly marketing, that.

Are you sure about that? From the review:

There is a system of movable counterbalances installed in the spindle motor hub assembly. These weights are free to shift, and with the drive at speed, those parts will settle in positions which act to actively counter vibrations.

That seems to be more than just making sure the platters are of uniform density when they are manufactured.

tanstaafl.

Whatever. The Green drives hardly vibrate at all, so I don't expect that "feature" to be significant in any way.

Maybe it's there to counteract the effects of screaming at the drives...