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. In our 4K write latency test, the numbers were in line with what we saw on the throughput side. The eight-drive configuration offered the fastest transaction speed with an average response of 1.58ms, with the five-drive RAID5 coming in with 2.32ms, the two-drive RAID1 coming in with 2.58ms and the single drive measuring 8.88ms. 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 had a simple goal in mind when launching the WD Red; they wanted the drives to be synonymous with SOHO NAS use, developing into the defacto standard for small NAS use. Their custom firmware dubbed NASware and related technologies get the WD Red ready for this specialized 24/7 operational task. The Red has all the features needed like no unnecessary head parking, drive tolerances that support RAID environments and3D Active Balance technology which reduces vibrational wear on the drives. WD has also pre-qualified the Red with leading NAS vendors and the host controllers found in most NAS systems. On the support side the drives come with a three year warranty and a dedicated support line just for WD Red owners. Today the new drive arrived and looks like the other wd red to me, I inserted it in my nas and started to rebuild the volume. After that I discovered that my drive is not compatible (at least from the synology popup) because it's a SMR drive (WD30EFAX), same old story here in this sub.. I guess.

For a long time there was an obsession with ashift=9 vs ashift=12 because of various reasons. This has an impact on a variety of things including space consumption and performance. Using ashift=9 on 4Kn is particularly bad for performance. Several different things have been done over the years to try to make this work correctly. I don't recall what the exact current strategy is, but I believe it tries to optimize correctly. WD Red is designed for NAS systems that have 1-8 drive bays. Available in capacities ranging from 1TB to 8TB, WD Red is designed specifically for home and small office NAS systems. The drives are extensively tested for compatibility and reliability in the demanding operating environment of a 24x7 NAS system. WD's exclusive NASware™ firmware technology enables seamless integration and balanced performance. Innovative technology reduces power comsumption and lowers the operating temperature, and with a 35% improvement in MTBF over desktop drives, WD Red is a more reliable and robust NAS hard drive solution. The Western Digital Red offered the best sequential transfer speeds out of the group of low-power hard drives. It measured 143MB/s read and 142MB/s write, well above the older 3TB Caviar Green which only managed 119MB/s read and 119MB/s write.

How about these alternatives?

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. 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. WD has also gone to great lengths to ensure a great user experience. They’ve worked with Synology, QNAP and other NAS providers to make sure the WD Red was qualified as compatible with these popular systems and host chipsets. The drives also offer a good blend of performance and power consumption, which is key given the always on nature of NAS drives. For that little extra push on the performance side, the drives feature a 64MB cache that’s been migrated from DDR to DDR2, which should be twice as fast. False. Various sized drives come with various size caches. You can’t instantly detect SMR/CMR by cache size.

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. 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.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. RAID Ready: WD Red hard drives are engineered with RAID error recovery control to help reduce failures within multi-bay NAS systems, unlike most desktop drives that are configured for generic use. IntelliPower, Advanced Format technology, NAS compatible, NASware technology, 3D Active Balance Plus, S.M.A.R.T.

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) EE Store is a trading style of British Telecommunications Public Limited Company, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. If you connect by example 10 SSD, you will be near to load 6G/s * 10 = 60Gb/s = 7.5 GB/s (very theorically, but maybe reach the PCH bus limit ?) 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:

Thank you!

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.