Hard drives may seem to have been outshone by solid-state drives, but they can never be replaced by anything. They are the best solution for a large capacity at a cheap rate, which is why they are always in demand and manufacturers have not discontinued their production yet. Even though SSDs are much more affordable today than they were a few years ago, hard drives remain the storage medium of choice for applications where capacity and cost take precedence over performance. Odds are hard drives are going to hang in there for another while.
Western Digital is one of the giant manufacturers of storage drives. The company produces storage drives for all types of users, from basic users to IT professionals and gaming enthusiasts. The WD Red NAS Hard Drive comes in four capacities; 2, 3, 4 and 6TB. The WD60EFRX Red NAS 6TB Hard Drive is the first 3.5-inch desktop hard drive that offers such a large capacity to home users. It is much cheaper than its alternatives which are actually built for enterprises. If you do the math correctly, it can store up to 1.2TB of data on each of its five platters. Like most current drives, it features a 64MB cache along with a 6Gb/s SATA III cable. In Windows, it gives a binary capacity of 4.45TB when formatted.
Like other drives from the Red NAS portfolio, it comes with a warranty of three years and includes NASWare 3.0, which is the company’s most recent version of the firmware for its Red drives. When the discs are in constant use in NAS units or RAID arrays, which could be left operating 24 hours a day, the firmware provides modest optimizations to enhance performance and durability.
Colors
Western Digital distinguishes its hard drives portfolios with colors, with each targeted at a particular market of users. The highest-end 7,200 RPM discs from the Black portfolio are intended for enterprises and advanced users. The Green portfolio minimizes heat generation and power consumption, albeit at the cost of performance. They are an ideal choice for backup systems not very frequently accessed. The Blues are lower-cost devices aimed at more economical computers, and the Purple series, which has recently been introduced, is specially designed for security camera recording systems.
This color-based naming convention has been devised by the company’s creative marketing team. While it does a fair job of distinguishing drives from each other, there are a few technological distinctions as well.
The Red portfolio features hardware-based vibration compensation technology to enhance long-term reliability when used in a stack of two to eight drives. The technology, dubbed “StableTrac”, ensures that the motor shaft is fastened at both of its ends to minimize the vibration caused by the system and stabilize platters for precise tracking of reads and writes.
Another important feature of NAS-related firmware is what Western Digital refers to as time-limited error recovery. When a contemporary hard disc comes across a faulty sector, it tries to recover it. And as it does that, it enters a mode that disables the host from accessing the sector for a limited time.
A desktop PC’s operating system will resume regular operations once the drive replies. However, a RAID controller will typically drop the complete array if it does not get a response from a disc after a specific period of time, potentially resulting in data loss. This period is set to seven seconds on Red series drives, which should alleviate the problem.
Warranty terms also vary. The Black series has a five-year warranty, which is comparable to that of its competitive enterprise-level drives. However, the Green and Blue series come with a warranty of only two years.
Spin
Western Digital uses the term ‘intellipower’ to describe the speed at which most of its consumer hard drives spin. Although the company has never explained what this means, storage experts seem to agree that it does not imply that the speed varies throughout use.
Instead, it suggests that your hard disk’s real spin speed is roughly 5,400RPM, though it could be marginally slower or faster, subject to the batch it belongs to. The Red series is classified as intellipower because they are consumer drives.
Western Digital has launched a new line, the Red Pro, for SME and enterprise NAS users. The drives are designated as 7,200RPM rather than intellipower, and they only run from 2TB to 4TB, with the same five-year warranty as the Black series. These drives, according to Western Digital, are designed for larger NAS systems with up to 16 drives.
Advantages
The Western Digital WD60EFRX Red NAS 6TB Hard Drive proves that 6TB hard drives are a realistic choice for the mainstream market. Although they are much more expensive than lower-capacity options, they are totally worth it.
The sequential performance is also quite good. For a consumer hard drive, the read and write speeds are excellent. The write speeds of the QD32 are what could be expected from a hard drive of this size. It comes with a three-year warranty. If your drive fails, having a long RMA time is really useful.
Disadvantages
You will not get the best performance here, and early versions had a firmware issue that slowed read performance. This issue has been resolved thanks to a Western Digital update.
Furthermore, while it is significantly less expensive than enterprise-level 6TB hard drives, some 4TB drives are still somewhat more cost-effective than it is.
Bottom Line
The Western Digital WD60EFRX Red NAS 6TB Hard Drive offers an enormous capacity at a low price. It can efficiently be used in 8-bay NAS systems. Its maximum speed of roughly 175MB/s is much faster. We experience a speed reduction when dealing with small files. In the case of large files, you will not notice this reduction. The induction of half a dozen terabytes in a single 3.5-inch hard drive would secure this drive’s merited appeal for most people.
The Western Digital WD60EFRX Red 6TB is an ideal drive now that the firmware issue has been resolved. You should definitely consider it if you are building a NAS or packing a desktop PC with several hard drives in a RAID array. It is a wonderful option for individuals seeking to expand their storage capabilities in a NAS.
An SSD is clearly superior to any HDD for application loading times as a system drive. Therefore, the Western Digital WD60EFRX Red 6TB is better suited for massive storage and huge gaming applications.
