Until the arrival of the Red series, the only real way to ensure your drives were up to the job was to buy expensive server drives. WD gets the thumbs up for working with QNAP, Synology and other NAS providers to make sure the range is compatible with as many products as possible. As it says on the drive, this is perfect for the nascent home NAS generation, and as SSD prices drop, the future of the humble hard disk is large scale storage alone.

Western Digital's Red family is a well-rounded offering aimed at home- and SOHO-based NAS appliances. The hard drives’ strengths include low operating temperatures, conservative power consumption, and modest acoustics at a 5400 RPM spindle speed. ...