EDIT **2/17/13**
These lines of drives do terrible at I/O performance. Instead, they are better suited for application or media streaming
Benchmark Results: Streaming Reads/Writes, 4 KB Random Reads/Writes
I ran into this little gem after seeing a SlickDeal. I had never heard of it before, but Western Digital has come out with a new line of desktop 3.5" form drives called their "Red" line. This Red line is unlike their Black, Blue and Green. Western Digial has been seeing an uptick of people using 3.5" drives in NAS appications for home use. It's grea to see Western Digital come out with a new line of drives because I believe these are perfect for vSphere Home Lab use. I always preferred the Black line of drives because unlike the Green and Blue, there is no power saving functionality. The Green and Blue line of drives can end up corrupting data because if the drives aren't in use, then they can be put to sleep by the built-in firmware.
The Red line of drives is different because it's specifically made for NAS devices. It has NAS aware firmware built in so it can natively function better when put into a RAID like enterprise drives. In addition, while even being in RAID, there is some power saving functionality that will keep your data intact. The kicker? The price is only slightly above the standard cost of the normal Black.
If you're planning on building out a vSphere Home Lab, I would give this product a shot. I wish these were out a few years ago when I bought mine. Maybe this is an excuse to start upgrading.
Here is a link to the 2TB drives: Western Digital Red WD20EFRX 2TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
This is a NewEgg interview with one of the WD engineers behind the new line of drives
Here is a techtalk interview that asks "Are Green drives killing your NAS?"
Edit--------/---------
some more information has been brought to light. Thanks to some reviews from Toma Hardware, it seems as if the Red drives aren't suitable for High I/O environment where there are a lot of random reads aand writes. Looks like this sort of thing is best used as streaming media at home or for other applications. If you have Red drives at home let me know how they perform in your vSphsre environment
Benchmark Results: Streaming Reads/Writes, 4 KB Random Reads/Writes
"Once again, Western Digital's Red drives demonstrate slow I/O performance. Just like in Iometer’s database, file server, Web server, and workstation benchmarks, the two drives can’t hold their own against the competition."
