[Baja 001]

To date most consumer specific hard disk drives have not been designed for 24/7-365 operation, but that looks set to change with Western Digital's new Red series of drives. The company has announced three new SKUs that specifically targets home and SOHO NAS systems.

The trick here is what WD refers to as its NASware technology which is presumably some improved error recovery control technology, most like WD's own TLER (time-limited error recovery). The drives come with a three year warranty, albeit this is for always on usage and WD even offers "free premium 24/7 dedicated support" for the new drives.



All three SKUs come with 64MB of cache and features WD's IntelliPower technology which means that they spin at a variable speed and as such WD gets away from telling us how fast the platters are actually spinning. IntelliPower was first introduced on the Green line of drives from WD.

As for pricing, the MSRP is US$109 for the 1TB SKU, US$139 for the 2TB SKU and US$189 for the 3TB SKU. This places them on a price premium of US$10, 14 and 29 compared to the Green line of drives, although you do get a year's extra warranty and 32MB of extra cache for that price premium. These drives would of course be just as suitable in a desktop PC, especially for those users that never really turn their PC off.