I want to purchase a RED drive for my drive bay so i can install it to support RAID. Question is, do RED drives support RAID?
I have been told that some older RED drives could not support RAID because they were variable speed. Also i was told that now, there are newer RED drives that have a fixed RPM of 7200rpm and do support RAID. Is this true? Please i would really appreciate some reliable information on this!
The Red drives were designed for RAID use.
Red drives are WD’s NAS drives and in a NAS, they can be configured as RAID drives, but in a computer? Not likely.
How can they be designed for RAID use if they are variable fixed RPM?
Please check this out! The RED drives here are variable speed!!!
They are not variable speed in the sense that you are thinking. The drives are individually tuned coming off the factory line to gain the max data processing (speed) with the least power requirement. They (plural) will be called variable speed drives because we can’t say that they will all be 5400 or 7200 rpm drives. Their rotation speeds can vary slightly from drive to drive. So, once they’re tuned, then they’re fixed. And, they will work fine in RAID applications. That’s what they’re designed for.
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Mike’s right. Being designed for RAID applications, they are not designed for typical use in home computers.
I own an OWC Mercury Elite Pro drive bay, and i have in it 2 RED drives. I haven’t planned yet to fix them in a RAID arrangement since im using them each one as a single drive! I want to ask… is this an overkill for such drives?
Have no idea, although if it not made to be configurable to be set as a RAID box, then likely no.
What do you mean by “Likely no”?
FYI the bay does have the ability to work as RAID 0,1/10,5
Chill out ,did you read what I wrote? I don’t know the product so I said,
Have no idea, although if it not made to be configurable to be set as a RAID box, then likely not.
Im chilled, im chilled mate, perhaps the typo gives the feeling of beeing frustrated or angry but im chilled no worries. I just didnt get if you were replying to me regarding the Overkill use of RED drives as standalone when i could of gotten perhaps BLUE drives for that use! 
Blue drives are much less expensive and are not made for Raid use. Just use the Reds, IMO.
Yeah I know I’m just saying, in case I never go to a RAID setup is it overkill using REDS only for storage as single drives?
Not if you have the Reds already.
[quote=“Bill_S, post:5, topic:205348”]Their rotation speeds can vary slightly from drive to drive[/quote]Is it possible to find out to what speed are my drives tuned to?
I wouldn’t know of any.
