WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Drive Review

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

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.

Intel Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model	Live Pricing
Processor	Intel Core i7-3770K	Click Here
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:

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:

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

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).