HDD upgrade - WD Red Pro, Black, or others

[Mateyyy]

Especially with the recent fiasco WD and other HDD manufacturers are in, regarding using SMR in their drives without disclosing it (https://youtu.be/bvRkynoFv1Q?t=997), I thought I'd ask some people that use or have experience with some drives I'm considering for an upgrade to chime in with their personal experience.

 

I'm basically looking to upgrade my now 6-7 year old WD Green 2TB (5400RPM, 64MB cache), both because I need some more capacity and because it's (and always has been) painfully slow, to the point where any game installed on it will hitch every few seconds, photos take ages to load or higher than 1080p videos will constantly be buffering, making playback a chore.

 

For 4TB drives specifically, I've got a few different options (all the prices are local and converted into USD as it's easier to comprehend): 

• WD Blue - $114, 5400RPM, 64MB of cache
• Seagate Barracuda - $114, 5400RPM, 256MB of cache
• Seagate Skyhawk - $116, 5900RPM, 64MB of cache
• WD Red - $128, 5400RPM, 256MB of cache (from what I understand the newer ones definitely do use SMR instead of CMR)
• Seagate Ironwolf - $134, 5900RPM, 64MB of cache
• Seagate Ironwolf Pro - $190, 7200RPM, 128MB of cache
• WD Red Pro - $205, 7200RPM, 256MB of cache
• WD Black - $217, 7200RPM, 256MB of cache (not really considering as they're notorious for being loud afaik)

My pick would be the WD Red Pro, because of its good performance on paper and added reliability of it being a NAS drive, though I'm open to hearing how well the cheaper drives could perform compared to my snail of a WD Green. Cheers!

[Void Master]

47 minutes ago, Mateyyy said:

My pick would be the WD Red Pro, because of its good performance on paper and added reliability of it being a NAS drive, though I'm open to hearing how well the cheaper drives could perform compared to my snail of a WD Green. Cheers!

Well any of these drives will be better, but I'd grab a 7200rpm drive for a noticeable increase in performance..

Since the only ways u can increase the speed of hard drives is either getting the data bits closer, or spinning the drive faster...

And from my personal experience, i hate Seagate  and Toshiba drives as they always died on me after few months or 1 year.....

However every WD drive i ever owned didn't die till this day (Even my 80gb WD IDE drive).

Maybe it's just my luck....

TBH hard drives are starting to age in terms of speed ........

But anyways for me i'd pay the extra price premium and go for the WD red pro just for the sake of having CMR, and my personal experiences...