 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at Western Digital's Red Series Hard Drive. So this is a five pack that actually only has four drives in it for a very specific reason and I am extremely excited about these drives and this hard drive packaging. I mean look at this. It's like, see it's flat pack and then it comes with perforation so you can fold it which makes it fit perfectly in this delightful little box. Sorry guys I get pretty excited about packaging these days. You know packages really get me excited. So we've got four 3TB WD Red drives. So what is a red drive? Let's start with a little bit of history of WD and their whole drive colors thing. I'm actually going to take it out of the anti-static bag so camera man can actually see the drive. So back in the day it was just WD Caviar. These days we have three, well now four, but we had three different colors. So we had black which is high performance, we had blue which is a balance between performance and power consumption and as well as saving a couple bucks versus the black drives and then we have green which is optimized for storage and energy efficiency and then they've also got velociraptors as well but that's sort of, it's like black on steroids let's call it that, 10,000 RPM. So this is all the consumer 3.5 inch drives. Okay so where does red fit into this? Red is for NAS and store, oh right there's RE of course as well which is the premium enterprise level drives. So WD hasn't really had a drive in the past that is optimized and with the perfect firmware and the perfect hardware solution for consumer storage. So they had RE which was optimized for enterprise or business storage but was very expensive. So so many consumers were running out and buying consumer level green or black drives or blue drives and putting them into these NAS enclosures or putting them into rate arrays in their desktops because they wanted to build themselves a workstation on the cheap and they need like a high performance storage solution for video editing or whatever else and what was happening was due to the way that consumer desktop drives handle error recovery. So error recovery is built into any drive out there and the Windows standard is that you wait, once there's an error, once the controller detects an error on the drive whether it's being read or written from, it should wait and it should try as many times as possible to recover that error before giving up on it. So that's the desktop standard. Read controllers work off a completely different standard and once the drive stops responding and is trying something like this for even a couple seconds at a time, it'll drop it from the array. So that's why consumer drives are not optimized for read performance because what happens is once they run into some kind of a problem, they'll try as long as they can to correct it which will drop them out of the array and makes them not ideal for read or NAS or storage applications. So red drives completely alleviate that. These are using enterprise grade hardware but at a lower performance and lower power consumption level than the enterprise drives because they're running at a lower spindle speed. So they're using a high quality binning process which means these are one million hour mean time between failure drives. They also come with a longer warranty than the standard desktop drives. That's a three year warranty and another part of the whole binning process that goes into these drives is the fact that they are optimized for multi-drive use. So when you have one drive, actually this drive is a perfect example because it's a 10K RPM drive. When you have one drive sitting in a drive bay spinning around and the read heads are moving all over the place, there's vibration no matter what. There's always vibration. You can't get away from it. However, when you take four drives and you pack them in tight next to each other and they're all vibrating, you can run into problems because the vibration from the one drive that's above and the vibration from the drive below and if you have a bigger enclosure, potentially the ones on the left and the right can make this drive moving around like this. So WD-RED drives in the binning process have much, much tighter regulation in terms of the amount of vibration that's allowed while the spindle's spinning and while the heads are moving around inside the drive. That means they are, besides being more reliable and running cooler, they are less likely to cause interference with the other drives around them. Next, compatibility. WD actually validates the drives outright with many NAS enclosures including this exact one which I keep pulling up because this is the one that I'm going to be installing these drives in and testing them in. And WD is using not only at the chipset level but also at the finished goods level with guys like QNAP Synology to ensure that if you buy a NAS and you put a WD-RED drive in it, it'll work. Period. If you guys have ever run into a RAID controller or enclosure compatibility issue in the past, you know what I'm talking about. Sometimes they don't work and sometimes the not working isn't as simple as not detecting outright. Sometimes the not working is more like it works for a while and then stops working. So that's much, much, much bigger of a problem. I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about it for now. So in summary, it costs a little bit more than a consumer drive, performs a little bit less than an enterprise drive. However, you're going to run into a bottleneck at the controller or gigabit ethernet level, you know, if you're running multiple drives, long before you're going to run into a bottleneck at the 5400 RPM drive stage. It has a longer warranty, comes with 24-7 phone support so you can call WD anytime and it is pretty much the perfect drive for storage applications for the general consumer and that is why people are so excited about this drive right now. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look online as Tech Tips and don't forget to subscribe.