Drive speed in NAS - WD RED or RE4?

Atty

Golden Member
Aug 19, 2006
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I'm looking at the Western Digital EX2 drive that was reviewed on the site earlier in the week. From what I can see its nearly the perfect item for what I've been looking for recently, expanding my network storage.

My current issue is that my Time Capsule, which I thought I could use as a NAS, is too slow. Reading videos off of it often ends up in interrupted playback and because its backing up both our Macs I'm rapidly running out of free space.

In comes the EX2. Based on the review it appears to come with WD Red drives which operate at 5400rpm. The review used RE4 drives which were 7200rpm. When accessing the files over the network will the bump in speed be noticeable? Would it be worth the increased cost ($250 increased cost)?

I'm a little lost when it comes to network read/write/playback performance and drive RPM.

Thanks!
 

KentState

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2001
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I can get over 100Mbps off my NAS using Red drives. Streaming probably doesn't take more than 12Mbps if you are streaming raw Blu ray quality video.
 

Zxian

Senior member
May 26, 2011
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Red drives will do fine for your purposes. If your NAS is having issues providing two or three simultaneous video streams, it's unlikely that your issue is the storage drives' performance.
 

daxzy

Senior member
Dec 22, 2013
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101
Red drives in a 4 disk RAID-5 can easily saturate gigabit connections when doing sequential file reads/writes. Unadulterated Blu-ray's are usually in the 20-30 Mbps range.

If you get Red drives, make sure to use wdidle to check the head parking time. Apparently some Reds had ridiculously low times (8 seconds).
 
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