WD Question Thread - Hard Drives, Dual Drive Setups, Storage Setup Optimization

[NumLock21]

So far my system has all the colors of the WD drive, except for purple. Can I use purple as a storage drive, even though it's for DVR systems?

Will there be a new drive color, I can add to my build?

Will there be any consumer based HDD that supports RAID?

[DeViLzzz]

Does Western Digital know the flood is over?  I assume by now your losses have been recouped and you can now bring the prices down on your hard drives or I will continue to buy Seagate and will tell everybody I can to buy that brand too.

[jeroen piussi]

hey guys

 

I have a new computer: this are the specs

 

Corsair obsidian 750D

Intel core I7-4790K

msi z97 gaming 5 Motherboard

GTX 760 GDDR5 2GB directcu II from asus

corsair vengeance pro 8GB 2400 Mhz

Corsair H80i liquide cooling CPU

Samsung evo 850 250 GB

Corsair RM750 watt power supply

windows 8.1

 

Now my question is. Where do i install my games on my SSD or My HDD.

[ace2k8]

hey guys

 

I have a new computer: this are the specs

 

Corsair obsidian 750D

Intel core I7-4790K

msi z97 gaming 5 Motherboard

GTX 760 GDDR5 2GB directcu II from asus

corsair vengeance pro 8GB 2400 Mhz

Corsair H80i liquide cooling CPU

Samsung evo 850 250 GB

Corsair RM750 watt power supply

windows 8.1

 

Now my question is. Where do i install my games on my SSD or My HDD.

Do what I do . Install most of your games and programs on your HDD. And put your fav games on the SSD. 

[CamEpic]

I have a kingston 120gb ssd and I didn't realize I had disk defrag running every week for about a month.... Should I be concerned? Is my drive potentially damaged? Note that recently I have had two major errors where my computer froze and crashed randomly since then.

[Takata]

Any way of finding out if your HDD or SSD is dying/going to die soon? This would be helpful to know, in the event anyone is experiencing such symptoms

Use any program that can monitor the drive's SMART parameters. There's a couple of users above using CrystalDiskInfo. I'm using a free version of Acronis Drive Monitor.

 

Does Western Digital know the flood is over?  I assume by now your losses have been recouped and you can now bring the prices down on your hard drives or I will continue to buy Seagate and will tell everybody I can to buy that brand too.

Quite sure prices went back down a long time ago.

[Omon_Ra]

Just a general question pertaining to my WD drives: I noticed SATA cables don't lock, or click, into place on my WD Black like on my Blue. Since the drive is in a desktop and it just sits there, I'm not too concerned about it, but should I be though? I'd hate to have it end up coming loose and cause data loss.

[Frostywood]

Is there a way to move or set program files to install to the HDD or should all be on the SSD anyway?

[Frankie]

Is there a way to move or set program files to install to the HDD or should all be on the SSD anyway?

 

The program files should be on SSD anyway. But I did make a file named Program Files 2 on my HDD and instal steam games and programs that let me choose instalation folder to instal there.

[NumLock21]

I have a kingston 120gb ssd and I didn't realize I had disk defrag running every week for about a month.... Should I be concerned? Is my drive potentially damaged? Note that recently I have had two major errors where my computer froze and crashed randomly since then.

win7 and below will defrag the ssd, so disable it. Win8 and 8.1 however does not. When it detects a ssd, it sends the trim commamd and defrags when it detects a hdd.

[SoftenButterCream]

What's the difference between Blue, black, red, green, and purple?

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

i want an 8 TB HDD , i have 2 4 tb My Book but can't get 6 TB in India , 8 TB NAS is 5 times costlier than the 4 TB HDD My Book , i hope you make 8 TB External HDD's 

[Kyuubixchidori]

oh, would love a response! so far in all my familes systems the hard drives have been WD.

 

 

anyway, so I had a green drive and a SSD in my pc, I took the green drive out to build a NAS, right now, its only running on the 1TB drive for a trial run. 

 

for a Nas build, can i get away with a blue/green drive? or should I use a red? I do not plan on using raid, and in importance is reliability, value, then perfomance. I heard green drives are bad for nases, but the lower power consumption and the disks parking should help their life in the long run correct? any advice would be grateful!

[Qub3d]

Western Digital: Can you answer the accusations that people have put forward claiming that WD Blacks are now re-labeled Blues using similar-quality hardware? 

[TheProfosist]

Western Digital: Can you answer the accusations that people have put forward claiming that WD Blacks are now re-labeled Blues using similar-quality hardware?

That to my knowledge would only be the 1TB and 500GB model. They likely are using the same manufacturering process at a minimum from what I have seen.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

Perhaps an odd one :

 

Short version :

 

I am looking for a passively cooled, single drive (or dual if no other option) NAS with the firmware on the NAS itself rather than on the storage medium (so I can take out the HDD and put a 500GB SSD in there). 

The QNAP HS-210 or 251 could do the trick, but being a long-time WD user, of course I'd like to stick to WD products and was looking at the MyCloud instead.

 

Does the MyCloud have its firmware on the device itself or on the HDD?  In the latter case, is there any chance of seeing a single (or dual) bay, diskless and fanless NAS anytime soon?  Or do you provide software that can partition and format new disks and put the firmware on them? 

 

 

 

Long version :

 

I have a WD EX4 with 4x 3TB WD Green drives (I had the drives before I bought the enclosure, so I kept them) connected to the PC via cable over a D-Link DIR-655 router (gigabit capable)

 

I find the NAS to be a bit slow.  Not in terms of transfer speeds, but spool-up takes too long.  I really want responsiveness, so this really does bother me a lot.

It is not really a problem when watching a movie, but music will occasionally stutter temporarily between track changes and general file manipulation can be bothersome.  Disabling "drive sleep" in the control panel doesn't make too much of a difference, so I assume that the drives spool down on their own. 

 

I tried attaching an external SSD to the USB port on the back of the NAS and mounting that on the PC as a network drive.  That solved the issues ... but only as long as the NAS didn't try to read something from its internal drives.  The second those spool up, the USB drive can't transfer ANY data to the PC anymore and the music hangs completely.

 

As a result of all this, I am looking into getting a second NAS and putting an SSD in there for data and music, which would leave the EX4 purely for video storage. 

I am particularly interested in the MyCloud because it is single bay and passively cooled.  However with there being no diskless option, I was wondering if they have the OS on the HDD.  That would complicate matters. 

 

Does the MyCloud allow for changing hard disks?  If not, is there any chance of seeing such a NAS (single bay, diskless and fanless) anytime soon?  Or do you provide some installer that automatically partitions and formats the disks and puts the firmware on them? 

[DeViLzzz]

 

 

Quite sure prices went back down a long time ago.

Uh no they did not. Western Digital was much more affordable at one point than they are now and then the flood.

[TheProfosist]

Uh no they did not. Western Digital was much more affordable at one point than they are now and then the flood.

Before the flood you could find a 2TB drive for sub $100 and as low as $80 on sale. That is where the 3TB drives are at now.

[SparkySamZa]

  :mellow: 

553 days across a time span of about 5 years  

[DLM_012]

I'm planning on assembling a FreeNAS build consisting of an array of 4x3TB drives. I have a few questions regarding it.

1) Would this be fast enough to run Steam games off of?

2) What RAID config is recommended if I want a balance of fault tolerance and performance?

3) Would Red drives be adequate or should I be looking at another WD line like the blacks?

[Frankz]

I'm in need of a new HDD as my old one is slowly dying(already backed up all the important stuff on SSD). I'm just not sure which drive(s) to get.

Use case: storing games/movies/music

I care about speed, low noise, reliability. Might run the drives in RAID0.

I've considered the following drives but I can't really decide which one to get;

1x 2TB WD Black - 133€

2x 1TB WD Black - 77€/drive

2x 1TB WD Blue - 52€/drive

The black has a longer warranty, the specs are the same as the Blue. But I read it's "optimized" for a different usecase than the Blue drive.

The blue has a shorter warranty, performs about the same as a WD Black one & will cost me about 25€ less per drive.

So which one should I get?

[niofalpha]

Any plans for larger than 4TB Black's?

[3DDude]

 When will WD create an ramdisk combined with ssd for offloading on pci-express bus?

 

E.g. Samsung has the 'Rapid' mode which uses your RAM to accelerate your SSD.
 

I've seen people use ramdisk for temporary files / caching.

Is WD considering these kind of techniques?

[NumLock21]

Is there a way to move or set program files to install to the HDD or should all be on the SSD anyway?

Programs is best installed with the OS drive. Now if you want a program to be installed on to the HDD, just change the path from your SSD to HDD, when you're installing the program.

There is a way to set the program files into the HDD, by using a command to do so and then set a junction point. So when you install a program, even though it says C drive (SSD), it actually goes into the D drive (HDD). This can be done with User account folders too. Set it with a junction point and any new user accounts created will go into the D drive. Problem with doing this it, it creates problems with the OS like updates will fail to install and some other issues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

[KnightofSand]

I currently have 2 SSDs (120GB, 250GB) and 1 HD (4TB WD Black).

I set up Windows 7 on the 120GB SSD and I am always close to running out of space.

The only files on the 4TB HD are my Steam directory and iTunes media directory.

I don't have the 250GB SSD mounted.

 

I want to set up the 120GB SSD as only a bare essentials boot drive for Windows 7 and Ubuntu, a few token programs on the 250 GB SSD, and everything else on the HD.

If someone could give a detailed explanation on how to do this from a command prompt/terminal, that would be amazing; I vaguely remember a Windows 7 installation guide that showed how to move the User files and other unnecessary folders to the SSD before Windows finished loading onto the drive, but have since been unable to find it again.

 

Thanks!

~KnightofSand