What Drive to get Red, Green or Other

[Revan654]

I keep going back and fourth on what harddrive to buy for my new PC. It's between Western Digital Green or Red (6TB version). I'm planning to buy two or three of them. I have no plans to put the drives in a Raid, people I talked to say grab Red's even if you have no plans to use them as a Raid since they run cooler and have more reliability to them.

I keep hearing about Head Parking issues is this still any issue on Green, Does Reds have this issue as well?


In conclusion what drive does everyone suggest getting? I'm looking for quiet and reliable storage harddrives with 6TB storage.

 

[Brado78]

Ok, Here's the thing. Do you plan to use the drives as secondary storage paired with an SSD? or are they just for storage period. As for the head parking issue. I have been using greens since 2010. I have not had a green drive fail yet. As for the Red's I dunno since i never used one. Red and Green drives both use what is called Intelipower. It is a piece of firmware that spins the drive up when needed and spins the platters up to a certain speed depending on demand. no faster then 5900 rpm. As for 6 TB of storage that is A LOT of data to lose if it crashes. I personally would buy two reds and put them in a Raid 1 (Mirroring).. It doesn't matter if it is a Black, Blue, Red, Green, Purple or an SSD. They will all fail eventually.

 

[Revan654]

Ok, Here's the thing. Do you plan to use the drives as secondary storage paired with an SSD? or are they just for storage period. As for the head parking issue. I have been using greens since 2010. I have not had a green drive fail yet. As for the Red's I dunno since i never used one. Red and Green drives both use what is called Intelipower. It is a piece of firmware that spins the drive up when needed and spins the platters up to a certain speed depending on demand. no faster then 5900 rpm. As for 6 TB of storage that is A LOT of data to lose if it crashes. I personally would buy two reds and put them in a Raid 1 (Mirroring).. It doesn't matter if it is a Black, Blue, Red, Green, Purple or an SSD. They will all fail eventually.

It will be used for pure storage and 1080P playback, nothing else. I have 2 SSD drives for everything else.

 

[bbhaag]

Will the drives be used over a network? Will they used for playback over the network?

 

[Revan654]

Will the drives be used over a network? Will they used for playback over the network?

Everything will be from the PC, No playback over a network.

 

[rchunter]

I'd get the red. Slightly more money but longer warranty, and rated for 24/7 use.

 

[bbhaag]

Everything will be from the PC, No playback over a network.

Will this be true for the foreseeable future(1-5 years)? No Fire TV stick or Roku Box or tablets ect to stream playback to over a network?

If this is true go with the greens. They are cheaper and will save you some cash when it comes to power saving features. The head does park on the greens and it will take a few seconds to spin up but if you are just using them on a single PC they will perform fine.

If you plan to expand beyond a single PC I would recommend the reds.

 

[Revan654]

Will this be true for the foreseeable future(1-5 years)? No Fire TV stick or Roku Box or tablets ect to stream playback to over a network?

If this is true go with the greens. They are cheaper and will save you some cash when it comes to power saving features. The head does park on the greens and it will take a few seconds to spin up but if you are just using them on a single PC they will perform fine.

If you plan to expand beyond a single PC I would recommend the reds.

Green it is then, Quick Question 8 second Head parking is only an issue when in Raid setup right?

 

[bbhaag]

Hell if I know. RAID is for enterprise users. I have a single green drive attached via usb and it takes a few seconds to spin up when I access it. Honestly I haven't busted out the stop watch to time it.

 

[fuzzymath10]

My greens are older (1-1.5TB from around 2009) but still working. However, the head parking does make an annoying click whenever I access files after an idle period. I have since added two 3TB reds and much prefer them from a noise perspective.

 

[Seba]

Red and Green drives both use what is called Intelipower. It is a piece of firmware that spins the drive up when needed and spins the platters up to a certain speed depending on demand. no faster then 5900 rpm.

Intellipower is just a name used by WD for low rpm drives. The rpm is constant.

 

[smitbret]

Green it is then, Quick Question 8 second Head parking is only an issue when in Raid setup right?

Head parking matters for RAID setups because the RAID controllers won't wait for the drive to spin back up and will report the drive as failing. That means the array has failed and then you have issues.

For standalone use, it is a non-issue. Some people will argue that the head parking causes extra wear but who knows? I have seen recent reports that show the Reds being no more reliable than Greens, in fact, some show them being less reliable but I would chalk that up to the harsher environments they are probably used in.

I have a couple of Greens in my FlexRAID (not the same as the RAID mentioned above). There is a 1TB that I bought in 2009 and a 2TB from 2011 and they have had no problems at all. Definitely good enough for basic storage. I wouldn't pay the difference for the Red.

 

[Coup27]

I have a 3TB Green (WD30EZRX) and it's a great drive. It's silent (when idle) and cool. The only minor criticisms I have is my PC does take about 10 seconds longer to boot (from cold) when it is connected. If I remove the drive or reboot the overall time is about 10 seconds less. I can only presume that it takes a while to initialise on first boot. The second minor criticism is the noise is makes when reading or writing data is like a soft thumping sound. My case sits on my desk and it's not that bad, but it's there.

I would still buy another but that's also down to the lack of choice. Seagate has gone downhill, Toshiba are noisy and HGST are pricey and I can only buy their NAS versions in the UK (not the cool n quiet).