Good 6TB hard drive for 1080p video: WD Green or Red?

[Cerb]

The Greens also aren't all that much quieter or lower power these days, just cheaper.

 

[Aikouka]

I figured that even with 6 TB, there will come a time, most likely late this year or early next year, that I will run out of space.

Well, the biggest question is how you plan on ripping the discs. Do you want to use no extra compression on the rips, which leads to large file sizes or recompress them? If it's the latter, you'll probably find that a 6TB drive can last for quite a while. A 1080p rip that's recompressed will probably be between 6-10GB depending on the type of movie or the quality. A 6TB drive actually has 5,588GB, so if we use a static value of 8GB per movie, that leaves us room for 698 movies.

I buy a lot of Blu-rays, and even I don't own that many. The way I look at it is that if I end up needing more space, I just add another drive. Eventually, I'll upgrade to 6TB drives or larger, but I'm fine with 4TB right now. 4TB drives are also more cost effective as you could buy a 4TB and a 3TB drive for the cost of a single 6TB.

So, as to the OP, I'd go with the Red.

I'm not a huge fan of Blacks because I find them to be the noisiest of WD's drives. Every one that I've owned has made louder crunching-like noises while accessing data. It's not uncommon to hear noises with the arm moving around, but the Blacks take it to a whole new level.

Personally I'd spend yet a few bucks more and get one of these: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/cont...=REG&A=details

I've had pretty good luck with my HGST 4TB drives, so I was going to bring those up as well.

 

[Dave3000]

I don't compress my rips. I tried but it takes too much time on my PC even on my i7-4930k. I already ripped 85 of my blu-rays and compressing all those would take a few days of non-stop encoding. My 2 TB drive does not have enough room for another uncompressed blu-ray rip. Maybe I could go for a 4 TB drive now and buy a 2nd 4 TB when I need more room. I can get a WD 4 TB Green for $140 and I think it should be good for up to 160-170 uncompressed blu-ray rips and I right now own 148 blu-rays.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Between the two, Red. Green should be off the table for your type of use. The Red also has a longer warranty.

The performance of the two will be virtually identical. The Red has a 3 year vs a 2 year warranty, but that will be reflected in the price.

 

[Aikouka]

I don't compress my rips. I tried but it takes too much time on my PC even on my i7-4930k. I already ripped 85 of my blu-rays and compressing all those would take a few days of non-stop encoding.

Oh, you're using an enthusiast chip... that's your problem. Do you have a machine with a mainstream Intel CPU? Intel's QuickSync, which requires an Intel chip with an iGPU, can greatly speed up your encodes and the quality isn't that much different. I've encoded a full movie in around 15 minutes with it.

 

[Dave3000]

I just returned a WD 6 TB Green drive. It was making ticking sounds every second during the HD Tune transfer rate test. My other hard drive don't make that sound during the transfer rate tests. I remember about 4 years ago I returned a WD 1 TB Black because it made those ticking sounds as well during the HD Tune transfer rate test and about 6 months later I rebought a WD 1 TB Black and that one didn't make ticking sounds every second in that test and it had a faster transfer rate as well. Does it sound like the 6 TB Green drive that I returned was defective?

 

[Carson Dyle]

Does it sound like the 6 TB Green drive that I returned was defective?

Yes. Healthy drives don't make those sounds.

 

[Elixer]

I just returned a WD 6 TB Green drive. It was making ticking sounds every second during the HD Tune transfer rate test. My other hard drive don't make that sound during the transfer rate tests. I remember about 4 years ago I returned a WD 1 TB Black because it made those ticking sounds as well during the HD Tune transfer rate test and about 6 months later I rebought a WD 1 TB Black and that one didn't make ticking sounds every second in that test and it had a faster transfer rate as well. Does it sound like the 6 TB Green drive that I returned was defective?

Ticking sounds? I assume that it is seeking, but hard to tell without listening to it.

 

[13Gigatons]

What about WD Purple: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IMPO5N8/..._t1_B00FJRS5OW

 

[tommo123]

Oh, you're using an enthusiast chip... that's your problem. Do you have a machine with a mainstream Intel CPU? Intel's QuickSync, which requires an Intel chip with an iGPU, can greatly speed up your encodes and the quality isn't that much different. I've encoded a full movie in around 15 minutes with it.

last i heard intel refused to open that up so the x264 guys could actually make decent use of it so they turned their backs to intel. they compared quicksync encodes with megui/x264 encodes done for speed instead of quality. basically, choose poor quality and you get same speed/quality as quicksync and the last time i tried it that seemed about right.

 

[13Gigatons]

last i heard intel refused to open that up so the x264 guys could actually make decent use of it so they turned their backs to intel. they compared quicksync encodes with megui/x264 encodes done for speed instead of quality. basically, choose poor quality and you get same speed/quality as quicksync and the last time i tried it that seemed about right.

I just used quicksync and it was faster. It does support h.264, I used MediaCoder x64 to do the job. SD was super fast 600 frames a second. HD was much slower at 70 frames per second.

I won't comment on quality though because people have different eyes and some people nit pick.

 

[Emulex]

What about WD Purple: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IMPO5N8/..._t1_B00FJRS5OW

Purple uses TLER=0 to reduce dropped frames, not good for data storage!

 

[Cerb]

Purple uses TLER=0 to reduce dropped frames, not good for data storage!

Any documentation for that?I know the AV drives did that, but I have not been able to find anything from WD differentiating the TLER implementation of any of the drives with it (gotta love how WD has stopped making decent datasheets...).

 

[bunnyfubbles]

if you're just looking to play back 1080p videos like in an HTPC, just about any drive will do; I used a 3TB WD Green a couple years ago to build a shoebox HTPC for my brother and it still works fine for playing back any video.

that being said, if you're looking to edit or live record 1080p video you probably would want a 7200rpm drive

either way a single drive might not be so ideal, although far less risky if you're using it for storing/playing unoriginal video, as was the case with the HTPC I built (biggest downfall is just reloading all the content if the drive dies, but that's not always the worst thing as codecs and practices improve with time)

if you want to protect what you're storing you might want to consider parity and backup solutions. For instance, upping your budget and going for 3 x 3TB RAID-5 would give you 6TB of storage and parity to allow one drive to die without losing data, and then later on you could get a 6TB drive to back up the array.