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WD Black

I would expect for the same reason why WD isn't making bigger Blue Drives. There isn't a big enough market for them, now that SSD's are falling in price as well as PCIE drives being released. Just a thought 🙂
 
Brado78 said:
I would expect for the same reason why WD isn't making bigger Blue Drives. There isn't a big enough market for them, now that SSD's are falling in price as well as PCIE drives being released. Just a thought 🙂
Click to expand...
I really don't think that anyone looking for 6+ TB HDDs for storage is going to cross shop with SSD's.
 
I think it's more like people who need that much storage are looking for Green or Red drives... not Black or Blues.
 
Pure conjecture here, but I think it's an internal choice by WD not to use the higher density platters and smaller heads. Reliability concerns (look at the seagate 1TB/platter models), and possibly cost concerns. It might just be cheaper to continue using the less dense platters and last gen read/write heads.
Looking at their interest in the helioseal and the idea of more platters, this strategy can make sense going forward.
 
Larger blacks would be nice, but besides my game drive (steam) the needs are not just there for high volum and performance. Best to just buy two 4TB drives.

The vraptor seems to have stopped improving as well with it sitting at 1tb. SSDs are well into that size now so I do not expect the raptors to get a upgrade anymore (unless it jumped to 4TB, but I do not expect that sized jump given the last few increases have been too small to worry about.

Greens are going larger, but then that is an advantage of the slower platters.

Blues are just the everyday drives for people that do not care (or so it has seemed to me given the small sizes / slow release rates).

The last move WD did was there 2 in 1 black drives where they put a SSD on a black drive, but it's implementation was rather sucky instead of working similar to seagates hybrid drives.

I just do not see WD being a name of note in the high performance rotation drive market for much longer.

edit:

just some checking of release dates of the last few black releases. Dates are based of reviews, so only ball parks

2TB black, WD2001FASS, 31st Mar 2010
4TB black (v1), WD4001FAEX, 27th Dec 2012
4TB black (v2), WD4003FZEX, 1st Nov 2013

The Black2 dual drive (SSDH hybrid) was 2013 I think





side check for the raptors
37GB 2003
74GB early 2004
150GB early 2005
300GB mid 2008
600GB mid 2010
1TB mid 2012


So overall we are probably a year over due for a refresh of both drive types.

Maybe we will see a 6TB WD black using He in 3-9 months time.
 
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greenhawk said:
Larger blacks would be nice, but besides my game drive (steam) the needs are not just there for high volum and performance. Best to just buy two 4TB drives.

The vraptor seems to have stopped improving as well with it sitting at 1tb. SSDs are well into that size now so I do not expect the raptors to get a upgrade anymore (unless it jumped to 4TB, but I do not expect that sized jump given the last few increases have been too small to worry about.

Greens are going larger, but then that is an advantage of the slower platters.

Blues are just the everyday drives for people that do not care (or so it has seemed to me given the small sizes / slow release rates).

The last move WD did was there 2 in 1 black drives where they put a SSD on a black drive, but it's implementation was rather sucky instead of working similar to seagates hybrid drives.

I just do not see WD being a name of note in the high performance rotation drive market for much longer.

edit:

just some checking of release dates of the last few black releases. Dates are based of reviews, so only ball parks

2TB black, WD2001FASS, 31st Mar 2010
4TB black (v1), WD4001FAEX, 27th Dec 2012
4TB black (v2), WD4003FZEX, 1st Nov 2013

The Black2 dual drive (SSDH hybrid) was 2013 I think





side check for the raptors
37GB 2003
74GB early 2004
150GB early 2005
300GB mid 2008
600GB mid 2010
1TB mid 2012


So overall we are probably a year over due for a refresh of both drive types.

Maybe we will see a 6TB WD black using He in 3-9 months time.
Click to expand...


Thanks for writing that, Yeah, I'll probably end up just buying another 4tb black.
I have one almost filled up with games and huge Photoshop TIFF image files. I have a bunch of other slower WD reds in my nas but I like keeping the files I use all the time on a fast 7200 rpm spindle drive in my main computer.
 
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rchunter said:
I like keeping the files I use all the time on a fast 7200 rpm spindle drive in my main computer.
Click to expand...

Same with me.

Current system is a SSD boot/os (256GB), main programs/games 4TB black, secondary "short term" storage is a 2TB black (left over from upgrades) and a 512GB SSD used as a scratch disk.

I was using a green in the system as storage but it was noticably holding up the system when ever I needed to touch it (I was short on cash at the time). I was also using a raptor instead of the 4TB for a long while, but it became too small and I was running out of sata ports, so it was removed.
 
seems to me that the WD Black very well might be played out, price/performance/capacity just doesn't give it much of a niche to exist in

some alternatives

1. go with multiple cheaper drives and consider RAID options

2. go with a less expensive drive and combine it with a small SSD for caching
 
rchunter said:
Thanks for writing that, Yeah, I'll probably end up just buying another 4tb black.
I have one almost filled up with games and huge Photoshop TIFF image files. I have a bunch of other slower WD reds in my nas but I like keeping the files I use all the time on a fast 7200 rpm spindle drive in my main computer.
Click to expand...
Do you really use all those TIFF files on a regular basis? You could archive a ton of those into a relatively small ZIP, RAR, or 7z file. TIFF compresses very well.
 
jkauff said:
Do you really use all those TIFF files on a regular basis? You could archive a ton of those into a relatively small ZIP, RAR, or 7z file. TIFF compresses very well.
Click to expand...

I guess I could some of them but it's easier to just buy another drive.
 
bunnyfubbles said:
seems to me that the WD Black very well might be played out, price/performance/capacity just doesn't give it much of a niche to exist in

some alternatives

1. go with multiple cheaper drives and consider RAID options

2. go with a less expensive drive and combine it with a small SSD for caching
Click to expand...

The price doesn't really bother me. Until they stop selling them I'll keep buying them. I just was hoping for a larger 6tb version of it is all. Having multiple 4 tb drives is not going to be a problem. I don't really want to get into raid with this computer.
 
rchunter said:
The price doesn't really bother me. Until they stop selling them I'll keep buying them. I just was hoping for a larger 6tb version of it is all. Having multiple 4 tb drives is not going to be a problem. I don't really want to get into raid with this computer.
Click to expand...

In lieu of the Black, why not the Red or Red Pro?
 
You better pick an SSD for gaming/workstation rig, and use slow-rpm HDDs for mass storage. High rpm HDD is becoming a niche very rapidly. SSDs are far superior in terms of IOps, and high-density 5400rpm HDDs are almost as fast for sequential I/O, which the HDD should be used for.
 
_CiPHER_ said:
You better pick an SSD for gaming/workstation rig, and use slow-rpm HDDs for mass storage. High rpm HDD is becoming a niche very rapidly. SSDs are far superior in terms of IOps, and high-density 5400rpm HDDs are almost as fast for sequential I/O, which the HDD should be used for.
Click to expand...

Yes, but not needed in storage applications. I would tend to agree with your assessment of the market, but think there will always be a market for 7200RPM HDDs... even if the manufacturers don't make them in big TB sizes. 🙁 Response time on some of the slow RPM drives (read: Green) puts some people off, not necessarily I/O time.

I'm going to upgrade my 2TB 7200RPM drive in my HTPC soon to 5-6TB... and I really want another 7200RPM drive... Looks like Seagate is my only choice.
 
_CiPHER_ said:
You better pick an SSD for gaming/workstation rig, and use slow-rpm HDDs for mass storage. High rpm HDD is becoming a niche very rapidly. SSDs are far superior in terms of IOps, and high-density 5400rpm HDDs are almost as fast for sequential I/O, which the HDD should be used for.
Click to expand...

I have an 840 pro ssd as a c: drive. but until ssd's get to much larger capacities I will keep using 7200 rpm spindle drives also.
Look, my goal was not to debate what drive I should use. I only wanted to find out if anyone had any idea if larger wd blacks were going to be released anytime soon. I still like them and would probably get a 6tb version if one were to be released.
 
@Charlie98: response time (latency) is not relevant for mass storage and the 25% increase for using 7200rpm disks isn't anything significant either. SSDs are 100-1000 times faster which means up to 100000% faster when comparing high queue depth random I/O. Even the 20MB/s random read performance is 10000% faster than harddrives, which do only around 200K/sec.

I don't think 7200rpm HDDs or higher (10k/15k) have much significance now. An exception would be where you need a bit more IOps performance and cannot use SSDs due to the data being too big. But these are very specific (niche) situations. The general rule is: use SSDs when you need speed; use HDDs when you need space.

rchunter said:
I have an 840 pro ssd as a c: drive. but until ssd's get to much larger capacities I will keep using 7200 rpm spindle drives also.
Look, my goal was not to debate what drive I should use. I only wanted to find out if anyone had any idea if larger wd blacks were going to be released anytime soon. I still like them and would probably get a 6tb version if one were to be released.
Click to expand...
Fair enough. But i think it's safe to assume the Blacks and Blues will trail behind the Greens and Reds. The Black has often had lower density than comparable Greens. With the 6TB having 1.2TB platters, it is in the lead. It also means the throughput performance of 175MB/s is very much close to the WD Black with its 7200rpm. Basically the rpm-advantage disappears when you have less data density, at least when considering sequential performance.
 
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_CiPHER_ said:
Fair enough. But i think it's safe to assume the Blacks and Blues will trail behind the Greens and Reds. The Black has often had lower density than comparable Greens. With the 6TB having 1.2TB platters, it is in the lead. It also means the throughput performance of 175MB/s is very much close to the WD Black with its 7200rpm. Basically the rpm-advantage disappears when you have less data density, at least when considering sequential performance.
Click to expand...

I understand what you're saying and I will look more into the 6tb green benchmarks. I agree the larger platter drives are probably the way to go. That new RE+ 6tb 7200 rpm version that they are going to be releasing looks pretty interesting also.
http://techreport.com/news/27947/wd-re-hard-drive-promises-low-power-mechanical-storage-up-to-6tb
 
_CiPHER_ said:
@Charlie98: response time (latency) is not relevant for mass storage and the 25% increase for using 7200rpm disks isn't anything significant either.

I don't think 7200rpm HDDs or higher (10k/15k) have much significance now. An exception would be where you need a bit more IOps performance and cannot use SSDs due to the data being too big. But these are very specific (niche) situations.

Fair enough. But i think it's safe to assume the Blacks and Blues will trail behind the Greens and Reds. The Black has often had lower density than comparable Greens. With the 6TB having 1.2TB platters, it is in the lead. It also means the throughput performance of 175MB/s is very much close to the WD Black with its 7200rpm. Basically the rpm-advantage disappears when you have less data density, at least when considering sequential performance.
Click to expand...

I can agree with most of this, but then I do not consider my usage to be that different from most power users. My issue with wanting Blacks is that IOps performance is really noticable when it comes to multitasking. Add in over sized directories (lots of smallish files) and I find I might be better off running several different PC's. A fast PC should be able to do everything, not just a single task.

I tried a green in a personal multitasking environment and it hung even the OS under, for me, what is a light load. And that was with a SSD as the OS drive.

If blacks stop existing, I will have to look at enterprise drives as standard / bulk consumer drives are too frustrating to use daily.


this is one of the better drive sites I have ever found. http://www.storagereview.com/
 
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greenhawk said:
I tried a green in a personal multitasking environment and it hung even the OS under, for me, what is a light load. And that was with a SSD as the OS drive.
Click to expand...

That's what I meant above about slow response time. Greens especially have a bad rap about head parking and the resultant slow response. I understand what Cipher is saying, but in real world use, there is a difference, that's why I prefer 7200RPM drives.

I will say I have a Red in my HTPC (along side 2 Seagate 7200RPM drives) for media storage... I see very little difference in usability between the 3 drives... but I'm not normally multitasking. The Reds are designed for that kind of workload.
 
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