Desktop drives vs. WD Red drives A desktop hard drive is not typically tested or designed for a Network Attached Storage device or RAID environment. Choose a drive that has been tested in NAS environments with an array of features to preserve your data and maintain optimum performance. Take the following into consideration when choosing a hard. Based on 5,296 user benchmarks for the WD Black (2016) and the Red (2019), we rank them both on effective speed and value for money against the best 1,015 HDDs.