Western Digital Red 3TB review

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Verdict:

If you're after a NAS disk and don't need the fastest small file write speeds around, this is a great low-cost and high capacity disk

Review Date: 26 Dec 2012

Price when reviewed: £115

Buy it now for: £115
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.okobe.co.uk

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

User Rating

While most consumer hard disks are designed to be jacks of all trades, Western Digital's Red range of SATA3 hard disks is designed specifically for use in home and small business NAS devices. To this end, it's built for durability, power efficiency and low noise levels of just 23dB(A).

Western Digital's Intellipower system, which uses caching, promises faster throughput than you'd expect from a 5,400rpm disk. As promised, the disk's performance in our tests matched that of many SATA3 disks running at 7,200rpm.

In our large file transfer tests, it wrote at 145.8MB/s and read at 150.7MB/s for an average of 148.3MB/s. It wasn't very effective at writing small files, though, with a 41.2MB/s throughput. Reading small files was a different story, at 62.2MB/s, giving us an average small file transfer speed of 51.7MB/s.

WD's Red drives are perfect for use in a NAS

Although the poor slow file write speed means that these disks are less than ideal if, for example, you want to routinely back up lots of documents to your NAS, the Red's low power consumption, low noise levels and three year warranty make it well suited to its intended purpose. At just 4p per gigabyte, the price is great, too, but you can buy the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB for slightly less if performance isn't so important.

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