Western Digital subsidiary WD announced the expansion of its Red NAS line of SATA hard drives specifically designed for home and small-office network-attached storage systems with one to five drive bays.
The suggested price is $99 for the 2.5-inch, 1TB Red model; $79 for the 2.5-inch, 750GB model; and $229 for the 3.5-inch, 4TB model. Shipping currently through select distributors and resellers, the Red hard drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty.
Powered by NASware 2.0 technology, the drives offer improvement in reliability and protection of customer data in the event of a power loss or disruption. They also feature 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology, which is designed to improve overall drive performance and reliability.
“WD led the category in developing hard drives specifically built for small NAS environments with the WD Red product line to service the unique environment of NAS and the growing demand for affordable, reliable, and compatible storage,” Matt Rutledge, vice president of client storage systems for WD, said in a statement. “Through dialogue with our NAS partners and customer advocacy for WD Red, we saw the need for additional capacity in the 3.5-inch form factor with our new 4 TB offering, but we also wanted to deliver a highly reliable and compatible 2.5-inch hard drive built specifically for small NAS.”
According to a report released earlier this year by IT research firm IDC, NAS is continuing to represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the worldwide small-office, home-office (SOHO) storage systems market. From both the revenue and terabyte perspectives, spending on NAS will continue to experience strong growth through the forecast period (to 2015), driven by a major shift of storage deployments toward IP-connected systems.
“This small form factor enables our customers to use high capacity NAS hard drives that offer performance, quiet operation, and low power consumption in a more compact NAS enclosure,” Rutledge said. “We see an opportunity for growth in smaller footprint NAS systems, media players and other industrial applications.”
Last week WD announced an expansion of its Arkeia network backup line of appliances, including the Arkeia DA1300 and DA2300, which are designed to provide small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with an all-in-one backup and disaster-recovery platform. The WD Arkeia DA1300 will be available in late September, and the DA2300 model will be available later in the fall.
The entry-level DA1300 features WD Red NAS hard drives, while the DA2300 features enterprise-class WD Se hard drives for improved data integrity. Raw storage capacity ranges from 4TB to 8TB for the DA1300 and 8TB to 16TB for the DA2300. Both appliances are field-upgradable, and disks are configured in RAID-1.