WD Red drives

Storage review seems to like them well enough:
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_red_nas_hard_drive_review_wd30efrx

And it looks like about $179 maybe for a 3TB (though nobody seems to have them in stock), which isn't terrible, and way, way cheaper than the RE4 drives that are usually recommended for RAID setups (especially from the NAS manufacturers).

Somebody needs to buy one of these and see how it works with WHS V1! Sounds like they should work well, if the trick of jumpering the pins allows it to format with the correct sector size like on the green drives.
Edited by WylieKylie - 7/10/12 at 9:08am

Ah but this are only for 1 - 5 bay NAS... So not practical if you want a larger storage solution than say 15TB.

Why? They're not doing anything (that I saw) to prevent using it in larger NAS's. Storagereview tried them in an 8-bay NAS and they worked fine. I'd bet it's just marketing to separate them from their enterprise RE4 drives.

Another short article on AnandTech.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6083/wd-introduces-red-nas-optimized-hdd-line

Newegg has them in stock http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236344

Interesting, they weren't when I posted

They appear to be Green Drives with a little better error correction and slightly lower power usage...for about $10 more or so. I think I will start buying Reds instead of Greens.

WD is advertising them as being reliable drives, basically admitting that the green drives were flaky.

Think we will see a price drop anytime soon or possibly a sale?

They just came out. Your guess is as good as anyone's.

I'm sure they will go down when/if mechanical hard drives ever go back to normal prices from the floods. I don't plan on buying new drives until then (I paid around $80 each for my samsung F4 2TB's before the flooding). But if I do buy new drives in the near future it will probably be these (since I don't care for seagate).

No, they are admitting that green drives were not designed for use in some environments.

I have had 4xWD Green 1TB drives with RocketRAID 2310 for 3½ years now.
One drive broke quite in the beginning but was of course replaced by warranty, otherwise has been running very fast and reliably all this time.

Now getting more space with these 4xWD Red 3TB drives...ordered already.
Just hoping that RocketRAID 2310 accepts these nicely;-)
I'm going to swap drives one by one and rebuilding the RAID5 between every drive change and then finally have the RAID5 to expand from 3TB to 9TB.
So it will be few days (and nights) job for HTPC on the summer holiday.

That is like saying a Ford Focus is unreliable because Ford built the Super Duty Pickup to be a reliable work vehicle.