WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Drive Review

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Test System and Drive Info

Before we look at the numbers, here is a brief glance at the test system that was used. All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. All benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running.

Intel Z77 Test Platform

Bottom 140mm cooling fan

The Intel Z77 platform that we used to test the WD My Passport Edge portable hard drive was running the ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe motherboard with BIOS 0607 that came out on 7/27/2012. The Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz memory kit was set to 1866MHz with 1.5v and 9-10-9-27 1T memory timings. Intel HD Graphics 4000 were used with driver 2875.

When we did NAS testing we used the Thecus N5550 NAS Server with firmware v 2.03.08. A Netgear WNDR4500 N900 wireless router was used that supports gigabit ethernet.

testsettings_550

Intel Test Platform

Component

Brand/Model

Live Pricing

Processor

Intel Core i7-3770K

Motherboard

ASUS P8Z77-I Click Here

Memory

16GB Corsair Vengeance Click Here

Video Card

Intel HD 4000

Click Here

Hard Drive

Kingston HyperX 480GB

Click Here

Cooling

CoolIt Eco II 140mm

Click Here

Power Supply

Corsair AX650 Gold

Click Here

Operating System

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit

Click Here

Detailed Information with HD Tune Pro 5.00:

hdtune info on WD Red

We fired up HD Tune Pro to take a look at the health of the drive and to see the drive attributes. The drive we are testing uses firmware version 80.00A80.

Detailed Information with CrystalDiskInfo 5.1.1:

cdi

We also fired up CrystalDiskInfo for those that prefer that utility.

capacity

The WD Red 3TB drive has 2.72TB available to the user in Windows. The reason that the drive isn’t exactly 3TB is due to the change in measure from GB (1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) to GiB (1GiB = 1,073,741,824).

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