For one, they use platters of 1 TB density
So do the "Green" labelled versions. Don't they?
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.
Also, 3D Active Balance Plus (a self-balancing technology) and NoTouch ramp load technology might make it worth it
Nothing special there, other than the marketing-speak.
Ah, noted!
would it be a dumb idea to use one of these drives in a regular desktop system?
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).
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.
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).
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!
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