Western Digital Ultrastar VS Red VS Gold

[K0stas]

Hello Everyone!

 

I am looking to buy a new internal hard drive to store my music, game, movie library and I found a really good deal on an Ultrastar hard drive. The thing is that these drives are marketed as data center drives which confused me since they have similar specs to the gold and red series. 

 

Price-wise, the Ultrastar is the cheapest, then it's the gold one which costs 25€ more and then the red which costs 50€ more (compared to the ultrastar). The Ultrastar and the gold one also have 512mb cache as opposed to the red one which has 256mb which is strange because the red is the most expensive one on the list...

 

Does anyone know the difference between the Ultrastars, gold and red drives and which ones are the best reliability-wise and for my use-case?

 

Thank you in advance

[Windows7ge]

I can vouch for both the Gold and Red but you should be fine with any of them for general storage so I'd opt for the cheapest.

 

Each is meant to appeal to a specific use case. The Reds are marketed towards NAS use, the Golds are marketed towards datacentere, and the Ultrastar are also marketed towards datacentere. Each has slightly different features that appeal towards each group but for home use really any of them would do.

 

If you're up for shucking drives you could probably get the Red drives the cheapest as white label drives.

[K0stas]

12 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I can vouch for both the Gold and Red but you should be fine with any of them for general storage so I'd opt for the cheapest.

 

Each is meant to appeal to a specific use case. The Reds are marketed towards NAS use, the Golds are marketed towards datacentere, and the Ultrastar are also marketed towards datacentere. Each has slightly different features that appeal towards each group but for home use really any of them would do.

 

If you're up for shucking drives you could probably get the Red drives the cheapest as white label drives.

I heard from some sources online that the datacenter drives are louder and they are optimized to work better when there are multiple operations at the same time. Is this true? and if it is can it affect it's performance when used for gaming?

 

Is shucking drives safe reliability-wise? I am aware that they use reds rebranded as whites in their external hard drives but are they exactly the same? For example do they have the same vibration protection and cache or are they using lower quality/defective reds for their external line-up? (selling a 12TB red with a problematic platter as an 8TB with 1-2 platters disabled, Just like the CPU/GPU companies do)

[Windows7ge]

1 minute ago, K0stas said:

I heard from some sources online that the datacenter drives are louder and they are optimized to work better when there are multiple operations at the same time. Is this true? and if it is can it affect it's performance when used for gaming?

 

Is shucking drives safe reliability-wise? I am aware that they use reds rebranded as whites in their external hard drives but are they exactly the same? For example do they have the same vibration protection and cache or are they using lower quality/defective reds for their external line-up? (selling a 12TB red with a problematic platter as an 8TB with 1-2 platters disabled, Just like the CPU/GPU companies do)

It may run as 7200RPM as oppose to 5400RPM which you may hear but datacentere drives are also built to vibrate less than their desktop counterparts so in that respect they should be quieter and operate cooler.

 

What you're probably thinking of is seek time (latency). From an IOPS perspective multi-client performance would probably overall be a little better than single client but at the end of the day you won't find an overwhelming benefit to one drive over the other if they're all the same RPM. If you're worried about the speed at which your games load you should really invest in an SSD.

 

From a reliability perspective I don't believe drives sold in external enclosures are binned as lower grade than drives sold stand-alone. Shucking would definitely be less popular if this was the case. Of course if you do run into issues with a shucked drive you have no warranty if you can't take the drive out and put it back in without damaging anything so if this worries you forget I mentioned shucking.

[K0stas]

I see, that makes sense!

 

The only thing that worries me is the quality of the drives inside the enclosures and whether they are meant to be used as internal hard drives. To tell you the truth I haven't seen any videos on shucking that mention low grade drives being using in the external line-up so it's more likely that what you said is correct.

 

I have an older external drive so I will check if the warranty has expired and if it has I will open it up and see if everything goes well.

 

Thank you for your help!