WD introduces new hard drive category

WD has debuted its latest hard drive, the WD Red, which is designed to work with small and home office NAS drives.
Available in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities, the new components is aimed at those customers who have bought a two to four bay NAS drive and incorporates WD’s proprietary NASware technology, which enables users to improve reliability and performance as well as improving stability.
The thinking behind this latest piece of tech came from the observation that consumers would often buy a NAS server without the drives and then add standard desktop PC hard drives – as opposed to using the far more expensive server rated drives. Unfortunately this occasionally led to bugs within the firmware or hardware as the devices are not always optimised for NAS usage.
“Until now, customers had to choose between using desktop or high-end server drives for their home or small office NAS systems – neither of which were both cost effective for consumer solutions and fully NAS compatible,” said WD’s senior director for product marketing, Melyssa Banda.
“WD saw this challenge as a perfect opportunity to design a better solution so we developed WD Red drives, an optimised product for this rapidly-growing segment.”
With the entry level segment of the NAS market expected to show a compound annual growth rate of 86.1 per cent between now and 2016, WD is keen to position itself at the forefront of this market.
The 1, 2 and 3TB models of the WD Red are expected to retail at £69.99, £89.99 and £129.99 respectively.

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