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Storage specialist Western Digital launched its Red line of network-attached storage hard drives for small office/home office applications. The drives are shipping in 3.5-inch 1-, 2- and 3-terabyte capacities, and are specifically designed for NAS SOHO systems with one to five drive bays.
The drives start at $109 for the 1TB model, $139 for the 2TB model and $189 for the largest capacity drive. WD is also offering customers who purchase a Red drive free premium 24/7 dedicated support and a three-year limited warranty.
The Red line of hard drives offer WDs NASware technology, which is designed to improve reliability and system performance and simplify the integration process, as well as 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology. With built-in intelligent error recovery controls, NASware also prevents hard drives from being dropped off the RAID due to extended error recovery. To further improve reliability, NASware minimizes the data corruption or loss in the event of an unexpected power loss by completing the command in process before shutting down.
“Until now, customers had to choose between using desktop or high-end server drives for their home or small-office NAS systemsneither of which were both cost-effective for consumer solutions and fully NAS-compatible,” Melyssa Banda, senior director of product marketing for WD, said in prepared remarks. “WD saw this challenge as a perfect opportunity to design a better solution so we developed WD Red drives, an optimized product for this rapidly growing segment.”
The hard drives are the latest in WDs series of color-coded hard drive solutions, which also include blue, green and black options. Blue drives are designed for standard, everyday computing needs and certain industrial applications, while the green family of hard drives is designed for use as secondary drives in PCs, for external enclosures and other applications for which low noise and low heat are beneficial. The flagship black line of hard drives is aimed at creative professionals and enthusiasts looking for enhanced performance for power computing.
According to a statement from John Rydning, IT research firm IDC’s research vice president for hard-disk drives, the network-attached entry-level storage market is poised to grow at an 86.2 percent compound annual rate from 2011 to 2016. “WD’s new WD Red hard-disk drives offer a unique combination of product features and customer support for users seeking to expand the capacity of their entry-level network-attached storage solutions, the statement read.