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Western Digital Black/Red/Green for desktop raid storage?

S

ss284

Diamond Member
I'm trying to buy a pair of drives for desktop data storage. It will be in a RAID-1 config on an X58 based system. I only care about reliability. Speed/price/power are not as important.

I was first planning to get 2 3TB red drives, but it looks like they might not be ideal for desktop systems.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!
 
RED is good for RAID hardware. It does not have TLER issues and does not have intellipark head parking.

Green is agressive with head parking @8 seconds.

Black has it too.. but 12 seconds.

You could disable it. But RED is better. It actually uses less energy than GREEN and has longer warranty and performance- and designed for RAID and 24/7 use.

Otherwise get a Seagate.
 
Hardware RAID is riskier than a good software RAID setup. As a bonus, you don't need to use Red for software, but Red is necessary for hardware RAID. Or just use Seagate/Hitachi/Toshiba drives and screw WD for crippling its Green variants.
 
Mfusick said:
You could disable it.
Click to expand...
Can you still with the latest greens? I've been trying to find out definitively after seeing scattered reports that WD at least made it harder to do this year, perhaps requiring something other than wdidle3.
 
Green drives suck. If they use more power than red and have less performance and warranty then WTF is the point using them ?

This isn't 2011 anymore.

Go RED or go home. IMO.

If green actually had an energy savings it might make sense. Or if they were way cheaper that might be attractive. Or if they were faster. Or if they had a better warranty.


Honestly they don't have any of that.

Green line needs updating and improvements.
 
So wait, there are other drive manufacturers other than WD? I had no idea. 🙂

But seriously, RED drives sound perfect for me. I have a Home Server running flawlessly today with Win 7, 2x2TB WD BLACKs (I know, I know), 8GB memory, a 60GB SSD, and a Sandy Bridge G620T. Serves up movies, music, etc. for my HTPC upstairs, my XBOX downstairs, a couple of Surfaces, and the other PCs floating around the house.

So, would it make sense to upgrade those BLACK drives to RED? Or should I just leave well enough alone?
 
GamingDaemon said:
So wait, there are other drive manufacturers other than WD? I had no idea. 🙂

But seriously, RED drives sound perfect for me. I have a Home Server running flawlessly today with Win 7, 2x2TB WD BLACKs (I know, I know), 8GB memory, a 60GB SSD, and a Sandy Bridge G620T. Serves up movies, music, etc. for my HTPC upstairs, my XBOX downstairs, a couple of Surfaces, and the other PCs floating around the house.

So, would it make sense to upgrade those BLACK drives to RED? Or should I just leave well enough alone?
Click to expand...

I would leave it alone, assuming your not using RAID since you didnt mention it. I have a WHS 2011 box with 4 x 3TB RED's and many clients with blacks and they are both great drives.

the only reason you would want the RED's in a non-RAID server (over blacks) would be less power consumption and less noise. Neither are enough of a difference in my opinion to swap out a couple functioning Black drives.

Next server you can switch to REDS
 
n0x1ous said:
I would leave it alone, assuming your not using RAID since you didnt mention it. I have a WHS 2011 box with 4 x 3TB RED's and many clients with blacks and they are both great drives.

the only reason you would want the RED's in a non-RAID server (over blacks) would be less power consumption and less noise. Neither are enough of a difference in my opinion to swap out a couple functioning Black drives.

Next server you can switch to REDS
Click to expand...

Ok, you make sense. And yes, no RAID (I am doing manual RAID-1 meaning I copy my movies to both drives by hand 🙂) So my rational brain agrees with you completely. My emotional love of tech just wants to buy REDs just cause. And my wife, who has a firm grip on our wallet is nodding in agreement to your post (well, not literally, but in my imagination she is there nodding).
 
Mfusick said:
Green drives suck. If they use more power than red and have less performance and warranty then WTF is the point using them ?
Click to expand...

They are cheaper and for serving music and movies @home and drive is plenty fast and don't need to run 24/7 either. The only reason to go for a Red is hardware RAID.

Yes, the warranty is longer but to justify the higher price about 20% of all greens would need to fail in the 2-3 year range. That's highly unlikely the case.
 
I recently had a green drive give up the ghost after 2 years or so. Thankfully it was purchased before they reduced the warranties. I am currently waiting on an advance RMA, but I decided to get a red drive anyway since I needed a functioning drive right now.

Of course, my experience is totally anecdotal, but I'm not too impressed with the green drive failing. Apparently WD "rates" them for 8 hours use per day, so maybe they really aren't up to running 24/7.
 
Thanks all, went with a pair of the 3TB reds from amazon. The premium for red over green drives was only about $15 a piece.
 
Not sure if you received yours yet, but I got a 2TB from them yesterday, and I was very impressed with the packaging: it was in a WD box (suspended in that box, the way retail drives are shipped despite this being OEM) which was then in another box, which was prevented from jostling around with air pillows.

As opposed to being thrown into a single box, bare, and protected by peanuts, which has been known to happen, especially at Newegg.

Now, to figure out why I can't seem to exceed 125 MB/s in benchmarks (should be getting 150).
 
I'm too late for ss284, but I wanted to offer another idea. I have 20TBs of storage for my server, but all separate 2TB drives in their own enclosures. Each drive has its own dedicated cooling and own dedicated controller. I've both read as well as experienced on my own re-building failures with RAID-1, so I use the server to keep each partition cloned on a regular interval. Also, I've both read as well as experienced failures with drives from the same lot code. If you're partially paranoid, you could buy one drive from one retailer and one from another in the hopes they are different lots. Or if you're super paranoid (like me), all my drives that are clones are different manufacturers than the target drive.
 
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