WD RED 2.5-Inch 1TB in Four-Disk RAID Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Western Digital’s 2.5-inch 1TB RED NAS HDD can be had for $69.99 at NewEgg or $69.81 at Amazon. British readers can find it at Scan Computers for £59.60 or Amazon for £66.02, while German readers can find the best offer through Geizhals where it starts at €73.55.

Conclusion

Western Digital’s RED line of drives have made vast improvements in SOHO and SMB storage arrays, giving them the performance and reliability that they need but on a scale that doesn’t carry the same price tags that the enterprise-class drives bring with them.

The drive can’t compete with its bigger brothers in the 3.5-inch form factor, but they do very well for 2.5-inch drives. They also come with just a fourth of the cache that the 3.5-inch drives are packed with, and when taking that into consideration, then we know that we have a great drive on our hands.

The RED series is designed for the use in network attached and other storage units with up to eight bays, and by using 2.5-inch drives you can do that with a much smaller footprint. It is well suited for a RAID setup as we clearly saw on the previous pages, and as always which mode you chose comes down to your personal preferences and needs. Four of these drives can give you a drive array that can perform with up to 425MB/s sequential reads and writes.

at the same time you get it at a good price, and barely any premium over other 1TB drives. A really great drive

“The Western Digital RED 2.5″ 1TB drive would be a great choice for small footprint NAS servers just as they would be for any other system. Good performance at a great price and long reliability in 24/7 running systems.”

Thanks to Western Digital for providing us with these samples