The WD 1TB WDBMMA0010HNC-NRSN drive kit fully met my expectations. I bought this drive to make a RAID1 pair. The drive performed well in my home-built FreeNAS server and provided better network storage performance than expected without any glitches or issues.
When compared with 750GB WD Black drives in the same server the RED drives appeared to give slightly better perforance in NAS. Maybe the NAS specific firmware isn't just marketing.
For more, read on...
I wanted to build a NAS server for windows sharing, iSCSI, and nfs sharing. I had an old 1U "pizza box" server with a core 2 dual CPU and 4GB of ram available plus SATA II (300MBPS) channels. I got one of the WDBMMA0010HNC-NRSN WD-red drives through the vine programs and I bought a second through Amazon to build this NAS server.
This drive is the retail package. It came in a nice box with 4 screws for mounting and a little bit of very fine printed material which I didn't bother to read. If a "bare drive" is fine and you don't care about packaging you might want to consider another listing for the 1TB WD Red drives which may be at a lower price for essentially the same thing.
The software I used to drive the NAS is the excellent (especially at the price) FreeNAS server. It installs on a USB stick of at least 2GB. My old box had several USB 2.1 ports, so no problem. I configured the drives in a RAID 1 mirrored array using software RAID (instead of the FRAID (fake raid) built into the motherboard chip set.
I first built the server with the WD Red drives first and ran some casual tests with windows shares and iSCSI. Using windows network or iSCSI I could saturate my Gigabit Ethernet with no problem. Performance was not an issue. They ran great and I had no complaints over several days of use. This isn't too surprising as many NAS boxes use little Intel Atom processors.
Next I did a comparison by replacing the WD Red drives with WD Black 750GB drives I had on the shelf. I didn't see much difference but I felt that copies of lots of small/medium files completed more quickly with the Red drives. Maybe the caching algorithm of drive was just better tuned for NAS on the Red drives.
A plus is the Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) which is an important part of drives that are designed for RAID deployment. And having a drive that is designed to be on 24X7 is great.
I've switched back to the WD Red drives in my home-built NAS and I'll update this review as I live with the drives and report if there are any problems or notable excellence that stands out.
Hope this bit of experience helps someone.
Update: Dec 3, 2013
I have recently gotten a
Buffalo LinkStation 420 2TB 2-DriveNAS Personal Cloud Storage and Media Server
In comparing my home built FreeNAS system (on old core duo hardware) with two of these drives to the LinkStation with 2 Toshiba drives was interesting. The FreeNAS system with the WD NAS drives (both systems with RAID1) ran about 50% faster than the LinkStation. You can check my review on the
LinkStation
for more information about my comparison.
The LinkStation might be a better option to get diskless for a very low price use these drives inside it. The small footprint and low power make it an attractive option.
Bottom-line it seems there may be something to the NAS specific firmware of these drives.
| Standing screen display size | 3.5 Inches |
|---|---|
| RAM | 1 GB |
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Raid |
| National Stock Number | 7025-01-618-5191 |
