If you have existing RAID with old 2TB/3TB/4TB/6TB EFRX CMR drives and you need a replacement drive or you want to expand your RAID with an extra drive make sure you get a right drive. You may want to get a spare drive before these old EFRX drive are not available any more. Enhanced reliability - Since your NAS system is always on, a highly reliable drive is essential. With a 35% MTBF improvement over standard drives, the WD Red drive with NASware 3.0 is designed for the 24x7 environment. On the other side, you have also 2 PCIe slots that use the PCH and if you use it, it's maybe the same. Reliability: Desktop drives aren’t typically designed for the demands of an always-on NAS environment. WD Red hard drives are designed to perform under tough conditions encountered in high-intensity 24x7 multi-user NAS environments. With the new Red hard drives designed for 24/7 home and SMB NAS usage, Western Digital still found ways to improve the power consumption of their new low-power hard drive over previous generation low-power hard drives. Across the board, the new Western Digital Red offered the lowest activity and idle power values. Startup power was slightly higher than the older Caviar Green models, but not by much.

For high performance pool (means SSD ones), i always tried to avoid PCH and prefered PCIe linked directly to CPU. I'm maybe a bit paranoiac. Sharing is caring! Share SMR HDD with NAS community! Get a notification when something new is added to the list!It is important to choose a drive purpose-built for RAID-optimized NAS systems to ensure optimum performance and preserve your valuable data. Take the following into consideration when choosing a hard drive for your NAS:

Perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) are technologies used to physically store bits of data onto a hard disk drive (HDD). For HDD manufacturers, one of the most important concerns is areal density, which is the number of bits of data that can be recorded onto a magnetic disk. Areal density is measured by the number of bits or gigabits per square inch, with the higher values allowing for greater storage using the same amount of disk space. SMR offers larger drive capacity than the traditional PMR because SMR technology achieves greater areal density.False. Various sized drives come with various size caches. You can’t instantly detect SMR/CMR by cache size. Compatibility: Unlike desktop drives, WD Red hard drives are specifically designed and tested for NAS and include NASware™ technology which fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads for optimum performance. As an industry-leading hard drive manufacturer, Western Digital stands behind their NAS storage solutions with the assurance of a 3-year limited warranty and world-class support services for hassle free data storage. The right choice - WD Red is designed specifically for home and small office NAS systems and PCs with RAID.

The Western Digital Red 3TB drive uses a primarily single-sided PCB, with all components facing the body of the drive for thermal dissipation. The board is held firmly to the drive with four Torx screws with a vibration isolation/thermal pad mounted between the circuit board and metal body. In addition, On some motherboards, you can have SATA ports that are bridged differently from others and in the way perform differently and it can have finally an impact on the overall pool performance. We tested our batch of eight WD Red hard drives in varying configurations ranging from single drive to 2, 5 and 8-bay Synology NAS deployments.In terms of performance, the WD Red did very well not only as a single drive, but increased proportionally as we scaled up the testing in the Synology DiskStations. With link-aggregation we measured read speeds in excess of 200MB/s (8-bay) and write speeds coming in just below 170MB/s (5-bay). Random I/O performance with each model in RAID was good, showing a nice linear increase in speed with each larger RAID array. In both active and idle settings, we found power consumption to be very good, with even the eight-bay DS1812+ filled with Reds measuring under 60 watts under load and 55 watts at idle. IntelliPower, Advanced Format technology, NAS compatible, NASware technology, 3D Active Balance Plus, S.M.A.R.T. It’s an interesting decision – WD is expanding their low-power 3.5" hard drive offerings with a second line at the same time Seagate exits the "green" market, claiming low-power drives aren’t really all that beneficial or quite frankly, special. The Western Digital Red family of hard drives is designed for the 1 to 6 bay SOHO NAS space, which is about as specialized as it gets. WD has several features that they’re touting as critical for the NAS user including; NASware specialized firmware, Intellipower low power spindle, robust NAS compatibility list, three year warranty and a dedicated WD Red 24×7 customer support line (1-855-55-WDRED if you need them).The WD Red family just got bigger - Our formula of success has led to the growth of WD Red into the highest capacities possible. Available up to 6 TB, WD offers an even broader, more comprehensive portfolio of NAS solutions for our customers with WD Red and WD Red Pro spanning a total of 1 to 16 bays. But the PCH link to CPU are done with a DMI 2.0 that if i understand correctly use like a PCIe x4 2.0 bus (or something near) Experienced in NAS - WD Red is a reflection of the most extensive NAS partner compatibilitytesting list that is available on the market.* That means when you buy a NAS enclosure, you can trust that WD Red will be the most compatible drive available. Our pride is in our product and our vision is shared with our customers. The WD Red comes in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities with 64MB cache, SATA 6Gb/s interface and Intellipower low power spindle. For data migration Western Digital has included a copy of Acronis True Image software. WD offers a three year warranty, dedicated support line and QR code on the drive for mobile access to product documentation and support. Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3000GB, 3.5", 6.0 Gbps, IntelliPower, Network Attached Storage, Serial ATA Hard Disk Drive - Brand New