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I think i made a mistake by buying a Western Digital Red 3To 64Mo 3.5

U

Ukaz

Junior Member
So, i bought a Western digital RED 3To 64 Mo hard drive.
Will it work in a desktop computer and not a NAS ?
 
rchunter said:
It will work but you'd be better off installing in a WD black or Seagate Barracuda.
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Wah?

Blacks are a lot pricier. Barracuda's are victims of Seagate's legendary (lack of) reliability.

Being a snob, I wouldn't personally settle for anything less than an SSD as a primary disk 😎 - but taking that out of the equation, a WD Red is performance competitive with most HDDs in its price bracket, and will work fine in a desktop machine.
 
dave_the_nerd said:
Wah?

Blacks are a lot pricier. Barracuda's are victims of Seagate's legendary (lack of) reliability.

Being a snob, I wouldn't personally settle for anything less than an SSD as a primary disk 😎 - but taking that out of the equation, a WD Red is performance competitive with most HDDs in its price bracket, and will work fine in a desktop machine.
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Last time I looked SSD's aren't 3TB yet...... I've got a 2TB Barracuda and it's been great AND FAST!!! And Yes, I would obviously choose a ssd as a boot drive.
 
ch33zw1z said:
The WD Red will work just fine as a regular drive outside of a NAS enclosure. Enjoy the new storage.
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^^^ That. In the end, it's still just a hard drive. I have a 3TB Red in my HTPC for video storage... it works just like the 2 Barracudas in there.
 
It will work fine.

If using as storage, not real issues, just some cheaper ones of similar performance around.

Personally, if going to run windows or programs from it, I would return it as the RED range is mostly listed as "IntelliPower variable RPM", which generally means about 5400 rpm. Not the best if you want performance.

Toshiba have a 3TB 7200rpm drive (looking at my local prices) about 20% cheaper. Hitachi has a 7200rpm drive (locally it is a NAS drive too), but it is about 5% more than the red's price, or alternatively Seagate has one for about 20% cheaper than the RED. The WD black locally is about 30% more though.
 
greenhawk said:
It will work fine.

If using as storage, not real issues, just some cheaper ones of similar performance around.

Personally, if going to run windows or programs from it, I would return it as the RED range is mostly listed as "IntelliPower variable RPM", which generally means about 5400 rpm. Not the best if you want performance.

Toshiba have a 3TB 7200rpm drive (looking at my local prices) about 20% cheaper. Hitachi has a 7200rpm drive (locally it is a NAS drive too), but it is about 5% more than the red's price, or alternatively Seagate has one for about 20% cheaper than the RED. The WD black locally is about 30% more though.
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Exactly. It really just depends what you're using them for if you need the extra performance. If you're just streaming media with them you will never notice the difference.
I have 10 wd red drives in my server and I like them a lot I just prefer not to use them in desktop machines. Plus they are built to be used as raid drives and have TLER enabled so they will act differently when errors happen. That's maybe not a big deal but if i'm running a desktop machine I prefer to use desktop drives. Everybody always says the black drives are so expensive and yes they might be slightly more expensive but they also come with a 5 year warranty, have more of a track record and are built better. They are basicly a trickle down from wd's enterprise drives.
 
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I have a red 3tb in a wd cloud nas and its quiet and power efficient. Actually chose it vs the 4tb drive because the 3tb is less noisy. Does its job perfectly streaming big photo files and 50mbit sec video. Even with more users. For boot, program and game drive any mechanical hd is dead slow anyway and the older wd black we have is much more noisy and power inefficient. Cant see the reason for black these days.
 
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It will work fine because WD Red is physically the same as WD Green, apart from an additional motion sensor. The TLER-firmware is not needed for single-disk setups, but it will work the same as any non-TLER disk would - up until the point a bad sector was detected.

For Windows desktops using harddrives as single disks, the data is given no protection at all against bitrot. This means that the recovery functionality of the harddrive is the last line of defence to get your data back in case of an unreadable sector. TLER basically kills this last line of defence, so generally using WD Red as standalone drive is not really recommended, unless of course you keep good backups. One argument against this is that you need backups for your WD Green too, but reality is many people use harddrives with data that is not fully or recently backed up, if at all. So using a TLER disk for this purpose would decrease the chance of successful data recovery should a bad sector pop up. It would be worse if this happens on filesystem metadata, because this can cause entire directory nodes to become invisible/inaccessible or the volume simply not be accessible at all. Advanced recovery tools may bring back files in bits and pieces, but this is a very poor situation to be in.

So my recommendation would be to focus on good backups as usual, and only use WD Red or other TLER drive when you actually need TLER. If you have one lying around you wish you to use as standalone drive, that is perfectly alright though. But keep in mind it has less chance to recover unreadable sectors so keep good backups.
 
Something strange ... My WD black 500 Go is less performant than the WD red 3 To. If i heard you correctly The RED is a GREEN but for NAS. The BLACK is doing 105 MB/sec and the RED 127 MB/sec under HDtune.
 
The new Greens (WD60EZRX) do 175MB/s on 5400rpm-class. That has all to do with data density.

Despite popular conviction, harddrives best have a low rpm speed - like 4200rpm would be excellent. This enables them to reliably use higher data densities which will increase speed. The result is something that uses very little power, has high capacity and also delivers high throughput; that is what you want from a modern harddrive.
 
It will work fine. But out of curiosity......what made you think it wouldnt work? Its just a drive going in a computer.
 
I thought it won't work because i read some reviews and there were saying:
"BEWARE, only for NAS !"
 
Ukaz said:
Something strange ... My WD black 500 Go is less performant than the WD red 3 To. If i heard you correctly The RED is a GREEN but for NAS. The BLACK is doing 105 MB/sec and the RED 127 MB/sec under HDtune.
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Why would that be strange? The 500 is going to have either 1/2 or maybe even 1/4 the platter density. It is no doubt older too. Drives tend to get faster every year by a % or two just from incremental updates even on the same platter and same RPM.
 
dave_the_nerd said:
Blacks are a lot pricier. Barracuda's are victims of Seagate's legendary (lack of) reliability.
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Barracuda is utterly generic. It has been overused by Seagate for too many products. I don't think that it should be used as a metric. Seagate is the victim of its own market product segmentation. They are still building good reliable hdd's, but customers forget the fact that the price of a product is a metric of its reliability also. People expect too much from cheap products, and often they use them the wrong way. Maybe you are familiar with the infamous backblaze hdd failure report: deploying cheap client desktop hdd's in a nas storage unit with enterprise load aspirations is not a good idea.
 
With the TLER if I understand it, nothing happens until a read error occurs that isn't correctable. Once that happens with TLER it doesn't retry at all? Does that mean in a non raid situation the data is lost, or can retries be manually or some other way performed?
 
redzo said:
Barracuda is utterly generic. It has been overused by Seagate for too many products.
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...and it looks like Seagate is abandoning the Barracuda name, now that they are splitting their drives up for different purposes like WD did.
 
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