Pros: The drives were very well packaged. Transfer speeds are good for what they are (see below in ‘Other’). Every 2.5” enclosure I put them in they fit without issues. Two of these drives perform very well in a RAID 0 configuration as well as on their own (both of which I tested). The drives themselves seem pretty well made and have large bearings in place of something smaller for basic drives. For 2.5 drives, they are heavier than normal, which I attribute to their construction. During operation, they stay very cool even in tight spaces. Also, the noise level is very very quite. Much quieter than previous NAS drives. The heavier construction seems to make most of the drives in this category more clunky and loud on spin-up. With these drives, this isn’t the case. They definitely shine in a RAID setup more so than alone (which is what is expected).

Cons: Granted, the price is one of the cons for this product. It is a little higher than a standard drive. With this drive I will expect longer reliability because of this. The transfer speeds aren’t really any different than any other mechanical 2.5” drive I’ve recently tested. Mostly what you pay for are drives that are able to withstand constant 24-7 operation.

Overall Review: RAID 1 was not included as the performance in my environment is exactly the same as a single drive (which is expected). . Single Drive: Sequential Read : 122.770 MB/s Sequential Write : 122.212 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 39.126 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 62.355 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.549 MB/s [ 134.0 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.399 MB/s [ 341.5 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.584 MB/s [ 142.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.400 MB/s [ 341.9 IOPS] Test : 4000 MB [G: 0.0% (0.1/931.5 GB)] (x5) OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64) Sequential Read : 127.958 MB/s Sequential Write : 120.151 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 48.045 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 89.076 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.594 MB/s [ 145.1 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.870 MB/s [ 456.6 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.755 MB/s [ 184.4 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.998 MB/s [ 487.7 IOPS] Test : 50 MB [G: 0.0% (0.1/1863.0 GB)] (x5) OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64) RAID 0: Sequential Read : 235.305 MB/s Sequential Write : 210.610 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 26.818 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 70.473 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.544 MB/s [ 132.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.289 MB/s [ 558.8 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.561 MB/s [ 136.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.993 MB/s [ 486.5 IOPS] Test : 4000 MB [G: 0.1% (2.5/1863.0 GB)] (x5) OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64) Sequential Read : 195.440 MB/s Sequential Write : 184.431 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 40.840 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 123.637 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.818 MB/s [ 199.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 4.729 MB/s [ 1154.5 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.034 MB/s [ 252.4 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 5.051 MB/s [ 1233.1 IOPS] Test : 50 MB [G: 0.0% (0.1/1863.0 GB)] (x5) OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64) File Transfers: RAID 0: 14GB of .mp3 files: 102 MB/s (Most likely limited by the drive they were copied from) 50GB of. mkv files: 166 MB/s

Pros: I received two of these drives to review, and tested them with both my custom built WHS and my ReadyNAS 312. Three things immediately apparent with these drives are : Their low power consumption (compared to standard desktop drives and laptop drives) and Because of the low power consumption, these drives run much cooler than standard drives. And lastly, these drives are very quiet. Average temperature in my ReadyNAS went from 42c to 34c (under heavy use). Power consumption went from ~35 watts to 30 watts. Similar results were observed in my WHS. Although the drives in the WHS are standard 7200 rpm drives so the power consumption reduced by about 10 watts. These observations can be attributed to the newest version of intellipower in these drives (lower power consumption, noise reduction, less heat generated) and the upgrade to NASware 2.0. 2 of these drives in raid 0 (and even raid 1) are more than enough to saturate gigabit ethernet for a home nas. Even single drive performance is very good even compared to other laptop drives (100+MB/s read/80+MB write). The new intellipower has been tuned for higher performance, while sacrificing nothing in power consumption and noise. Drives carry a 3 year warranty (a good thing considering drive warranties have been reduced over the past few years). Benchmarks of these drives can be found by a few different review sites and perhaps a few eggxperts will post some also. The bottom line is these drives perform quite well by today's standards for 2.5 inch drives - that's great considering the size of these drives (1TB) and power consumption and noise levels of these drives.

Cons: None on these drives, however the 1st gen Red desktop size drives have a bad reputation. Hopefully WD has learned what was wrong with those drives and has made a reliable quality product.

Overall Review: I was excited to see WD release the RED series drives in a 2.5 inch form factor. This will allow NAS devices to get to a MUCH smaller form factor - I am thinking my ReadyNAS could be about 1/3 of the size it is now (since it wouldn't have to accommodate 2 desktop size HDDs) and home server boxes in a much smaller form factor as well. With everything going to smaller form factors, these drives *should they prove to be reliable* will allow a shrinking of NAS/Home servers and allow an even lower power requirement as well. And with a lower power requirement, less cooling will be needed - which will also mean less noise as well.

Pros: Very quiet; Almost silent. Lowest power usage in a platter-type NAS drive I know of. If you're looking for best power efficiency from a NAS drive, this is it. This Watts per Gigabyte is currently unbeatable. Perfectly fast for gigabit LAN usage. Works fine with my Qnap TS-419P+ in single drive, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

Cons: The potential applications where a 2.5" NAS drive would be a necessary choice over a 3.5" drive are difficult to imagine. It seems like this will be a niche market item. Nothing wrong with it, just most users will opt for the lower upfront $/GB of a 3.5" Red drive.

Overall Review: Single drive posts 90MB/s writes and 100-110MB/s reads on the outer tracks when plugged into a SATA 600 port on a X79 motherboard. The inner tracks are about 42-55MB/s read and write. Access times are 14.5-14.8ms. WD claims 1.4W power consumption when actively reading or writing. I measured closer to 1.2W. The claimed 0.6W idle is pretty much spot on with the two drives I tested showing 0.57-0.64W. For someone on a very tight space or power budget, these make sense. They also make sense for noise-sensitive environments. Typical SOHO applications are not usually power, space, or noise constrained to any noteworthy degree. I usually don't write a review on a drive until I've had it for a few months. Since 'egg wants a review posted within 2 weeks, I deliberately tried to cram a few months of use into 14 days. 85TB written to the RAID 0 pair of these in my Qnap gave 0 errors. I also ran them through several dozen power cycles with no problems

Pros: Got a pair of these bad boys, and I am very happy with them. Quiet. Fast enough for my needs. Small form factor. The older I get, the more I want less. Less clutter, less wires, less size, more things stashed away in a dark hidden corner where I never have to see them or even know they're there unless there's a problem. These drives are great for that since you can build a small headless NAS that can go anywhere there's power + network. I've always been a fan of WD drives. I've never had a single issue with any, and I've used green, blue, black, and now red over many years.

Cons: Doesn't come with a cable or 3.5" adapter. Luckily, I have tons of both! Small price premium over larger drives with more capacity, but might not be a con if this drive is what you're looking for. Quiet, but not silent. If you're very close to your case (a foot or two), you can hear a very slight noise when the drives are active. It's a mechanical device, so this isn't unexpected, and it's very unobtrusive. If you want totally silent, spend a ton more money on SSDs.

Overall Review: It's a hard drive, so there isn't really a lot to say about it. Would I recommend this drive to others? Yes, if it's what you're looking for -> small form factor, large data storage, NAS-optimized hardware and firmware. Speaking of which, there's always a chance that it's all marketing fluff for the "red" features that you can read on WD's website. My experience has led me to trust WD, so if you're looking for this kind of NAS drive, I'd say it's a buy. Benchmarks! These are run on my Windows 8.1 home server NAS with the following specs: Fractal Design Node, slightly modded ASUS P8H77-I motherboard Intel Celeron G1610 processor Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) ram Intel 520 120GB SSD boot drive 2x WD Red WD10JFCX data drives (these guys) Windows 8.1. Why? Because it has a ton more features than a standard NAS, and I get a heck of a discount at my work. ***HD Tune Pro Tests*** Single Drive (tested two drives, these speeds are the averages between the two) Benchmark Read: Minimum - 52.4 MB/s Maximum - 110.2 MB/s Average - 86.1 MB/s Access time - 16.8 ms Burst rate - 265.7 MB/s CPU Usage - 2.6% Benchmark Write: Minimum - 51.4 MB/s Maximum - 107.6 MB/s Average - 84.4 MB/s Access time - 16.1 ms Burst rate - 58.8 MB/s CPU usage - 35.7% Random Access Read 512 bytes - .029 MB/s 4 KB - .240 MB/s 64KB - 3.648 MB/s 1 MB - 34.670 MB/s Random - 22.565 MB/s Random Access Write 512 bytes - .030 MB/s 4 KB - .480 MB/s 64 KB - 8.523 MB/s 1 MB - 41.746 MB/s Random - 19.883 MB/s Network transfer via gigabit file copy and paste of 40.1 GB Avatar Blu-Ray M2TS file Between my Windows 8.1 desktop and my Windows 8.1 NAS, averaged out over 3 runs each, to and from Software RAID 0 (Striped) 104 MB/sec (832 mbps) Software RAID 1 (Mirrored) 113 MB/sec (904 mbps) Why wasn't striped faster? Because it's being transferred over my network, and 832mbps is pretty close to the gigabit limit. Both striped and mirrored tests are network-speed limited, unfortunately. If you're buying these as NAS drives, though, you'll want to use mirrored for better data redundancy.

Pros: These are awesome little hard drives. 2.5” hard drives traditionally are lower power and lighter weight compared to their larger 3.5” counterparts. This is a laptop-form-factor hard drive. These will work very well for me in my servers, because they have RAID cards connected to backplanes for 2.5” drives. Traditionally, these drive bays in servers are populated with expensive 10k SAS drives, but I’ll be able to use these drives to provide higher storage density at a much lower cost in my home server rack where performance is a secondary concern. This drive runs very cool and is pretty silent. Normally when dealing with 2.5” hard drives, I have come to expect lower performance. Afterall, the 2.5” form factor drives are normally designed for laptops and aren’t normally designed to be high performance. But these drives outperform some of my 3.5” hard drives in my desktops! They seem to be a very consistent 40MB/s read speed and 35MB/s write speed when I benchmark them. If you decide not to use this in a server\NAS, there’s no reason why you couldn’t toss it in a laptop. It would fit!

Cons: The cost of these 2.5” Red drives are greater than the costs of their 3.5” counterparts, but when compared with the costs of high performance 2.5” server drives, these are still dirt cheap. When transporting this drive, I’m concerned about the durability compared with a 3.5” drive. I don’t feel entirely comfortable transporting it in my bag without it being in an enclosure, when I do feel pretty comfortable tossing a 3.5” drive or an SSD in my bag. If this is living its life in a server\NAS, it’s obviously not a major concern. When I was testing it out, I was carrying it to and from work and tossing it in my SATA dock, so I was realizing my concern about this.

Overall Review: All in all, for my storage server I’ll be sticking with 3.5” drives since they fit in the trays. But when I need a drive for a server with 2.5” drive trays, I now feel very comfortable looking at these 2.5” WD Red drives as a server solution. Normally, when I do a hard drive benchmark, I will see the drive’s performance deteriorate during the benchmark. (It will start out at a fast speed, the cache will fill up, and you will watch the drive slow down as it needs to access the disk). With this NAS drive, I was very impressed to see a solid steady benchmark speed with no noticeable deterioration over time. This is fantastic if you’re putting the drive in an environment where it will be heavily reading and writing for long periods of time. In a NAS or storage server environment, there are obvious advantages to having a consistent and predictable disk bandwidth, in contrast with the desktop environment where disk usage is much more bursty, and having faster burst speeds results in better performance.

Pros: These are solid 2.5in HDD's. For some people these would be a great choice to use in a NAS. As marketed, they are appropriate for someone in a small office or at home. The performance is good including in RAID. I ran multiple instances of a benchmarks to simulate multiple people using it heavily. It had solid sustained read and write speed including when doing multiple read at the same time or reading and writing simultaneously. Reading in just a single instance it go 110MB/s with very little variation. Reading two files at once the speed was cut exactly in half to 52MB/s. Writing and read+write did scale quite as well but still scalled well. If you want to use a couple of these in a media server with a few people streaming from it, these drives will do the job. They are compact, and low power. Being low power is a definite benefit since these are meant to be used 24/7. Being 2.5in is nice but considering the NAS bay you have is likely going to be designed for 3.5in, you won't be saving space obviosuly. Very quiet and little vibration. 3-year warranty is a nice plus. High number of compatible NAS bays. They are supposed to be able to finish writes if they detect loss of power.

Cons: These cost a premium per gigabyte. There are reasons obviously give the longer warranty, NASware2.0 firmware, and the fact that they offer good performance in a small, power-efficient package. If those pros aren't things you need, then there are definitely cheaper solutions that will be just as good. Considering you'll be buying a few of these that price will add up. Other than that I could not find a fault with these drives.

Overall Review: I've always had good experience with WD hard drives in the past.

Pros: I received 2 of these drives to do my NewEgg Eggxpert Review on today. From Western Digital, these drives are specifically built for the Network Attached Storage devices, but can also be used as a normal hard drive. Let’s start off with the Pros: -These drives are 2.5in instead of 3.5in drives, giving you a lot more space for heat dispersion in your NAS or you computer case if you wanted to use it as a normal hard drive. -Western Digital combines firmware in the drive that automatically gives the drive a performance boost when using it for NAS devices. -When testing the drives, I hear little to no noise from the drive itself. -Performance wise, testing with Crystal Disk Mark software, I got speeds on my NAS around 80-110 MB/s reads, which is pretty decent as my other Toshiba drives I had were put to shame. - These drives use less power than normal 3.in drives, saving you a little bit over time on your electric bills.

Cons: As far as the hard drives go, I did not experience any issues what-so-ever. It would have been nice for WD or Newegg to include adapters to the 3.5in, but in all reality you are just paying for the drive itself. It isn’t as fast as an SSD, but for the price, these are a good alternative for those with money issues.

Overall Review: In the end, after testing the drives in my NAS, I am using one as a replacement for one of my external hard drives that failed a couple weeks ago. The other I let my buddy at work use to expand the storage on his laptop. I love every aspect of these drives. I greatly recommend these for anyone needing more storage for the NAS or just as a regular hard drive for other devices. The NAS I used to test the drives was the one I received a couple months back to do a review on which was the Netgear Ready NAS 310. I received great performance from both drives.

Pros: What is the RED series: For those of you who dont know, WD's RED series is made for network systems. The nasware 2.0 is a combination of hardware and firmware made specifically to work with NAS devices. You do not need to install software, it is all built in. And yes, these also work with normal computers, not just network storage devices. Speed: These tests were performed by copying files from one of these drives to another. Small Files: 90 - 100 MB/s Large Files: 100 - 115 MB/s Easy to install: This hard drive is as easy to install an any other. The 2.5" size is nice for fitting more hard drives into your devices, just make sure you get a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter if you need one. Vibration: One thing WD tried improving is the drive vibration since vibrations can lower the life of HDDs. These devices do seem to actually lower the vibration like they claim. It is not a huge difference but it could help over a long period of time. Even under load they vibrate less than normal HDDs. Heat: Even under a heavy load, these drives do not heat up much. I tested them under high load and without fans and they seemed pretty cool (not much hotter than room temperature). Western Digital drives: Even though I cannot say if these drives will last as long as my other WD drives, WD has good quality HDDs. The first WD drive I bought was 4 years ago and I have never had a problem with it yet. The RED drives even have an extended warranty so that is an added bonus. Pros: -High stable transfer speeds -Built for NAS devices -No special software required -Low energy consumption -Lower vibration -Low heat -WD's overall reliability

Cons: I do not really have any cons for these. The transfer speeds seem good and they seem to do everything they claim. The only con I have is my fault. I cut myself when I was unplugging the power connector from one of these. I dont even know how since there are no sharp parts on these drives, they are very smooth. Price: The only con I can see is the price. These drives are more expensive than a normal 1TB hard drive. Yes these are built for NAS devices and they are only 2.5" but it still seems pricey.

Overall Review: I would recommend these drives to anyone who needs a hard drive for their NAS device. I have never run into problems with any WD HDDs. The 2.5" size does not seem to be common in NAS devices but you could always get an adapter to fit more of these in a 3.5" bay. The only problem is the price compare to other 1TB hard drives that have been around longer but besides that, these seem like great HDDs.