New WD Colours

[Spikkel]

I lost another drive, this time a WD green. This is the first WD to go, much better than my track record with Seagate, so I will stick to WD for now.

So I need a new WD drive. Question is which do I choose. WD changed their drive lineup a bit.

 

My priorities are (in order): Reliability (replacing drives is more expensive than just buying a good one to begin with - I think), performance (balanced read/write), Low noise/vibration and lastly price.

Use case: Short to medium term storage of high volume, small files (for photography business) in silent desktop PC. Might be moved over to a NAS at some point.

 

So I'm considering WD red/gold maybe purple. If I'm correct (and please correct me if I'm wrong); reds will be great for the eventual NAS use-case, but are read-optimized, and will be slow in the balanced environment of my photo editing workflow (almost equal read-write operations). Purple again is write optimized. So what about Gold??? is seems like the perfect fit but is much more expensive. Is it really that much better in terms of reliability and performance, or is it just a "because I can"-overpriced kind of drive, or is it really worth it's weight in Gold?

~Blame Linus for the bad pun, he started it...~

 

EDIT: After some thought, I think a low latency will be more important than the read/write balance. Reliability remains the top priority.

 

[NelizMastr]

The WD Gold is what was previously known as the WD RE drives, they're enterprise grade harddisks with an excellent track record, with a price tag to match. 

The Purple and Red drives aren't general purpose drives, for that, there's Blue and Black, of which the Black drives are the most reliable and speedy.

 

Also, if the reliable storage is important, definitely look into a proper back-up solution. It could be as simple as back-ing up all files once a week to an external HDD which is otherwise not running or connected.

[Spikkel]

1 minute ago, NelizMastr said:

The WD Gold is what was previously known as the WD RE drives, they're enterprise grade harddisks with an excellent track record, with a price tag to match. 

The Purple and Red drives aren't general purpose drives, for that, there's Blue and Black, of which the Black drives are the most reliable and speedy.

Just to clarify, would you classify my use-case as "general purpose"?

[Anghammarad]

WD Reds are for the use in NAS storages and are designed for 24/7 use.

WD Purple are designed for 24/7 surveillance equipment use and optimized for writing video streams from surveillance cameras.

 

Those drives above don't like spin downs/spin ups like shutdown and bootup. As they are designed for 24/7 usage. They die earlier when put into a system that gets shut down and fired up often a day. 

[Spikkel]

7 minutes ago, Anghammarad said:

WD Reds are for the use in NAS storages and are designed for 24/7 use.

WD Purple are designed for 24/7 surveillance equipment use and optimized for writing video streams from surveillance cameras.

 

Those drives above don't like spin downs/spin ups like shutdown and bootup. As they are designed for 24/7 usage. They die earlier when put into a system that gets shut down and fired up often a day. 

So based on your info its between black and gold.., or is the gold also a 24/7-don't-like spin-ups kind of drive?

[NelizMastr]

7 minutes ago, Spikkel said:

So based on your info its between black and gold.., or is the gold also a 24/7-don't-like spin-ups kind of drive?

Get a black and with the money you saved from not going with a gold, get a back-up drive  

[Spikkel]

3 hours ago, NelizMastr said:

Get a black and with the money you saved from not going with a gold, get a back-up drive  

I have enough back-up drives. I just want to lose less money replacing drives. To work out the MTBF/$ would have been a good indication but is not listed for the black drives.

[NelizMastr]

8 minutes ago, Spikkel said:

I have enough back-up drives. I just want to lose less money replacing drives. To work out the MTBF/$ would have been a good indication but is not listed for the black drives.

This article might be of interest as a general idea of the differences between Black and RE/Gold

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Black-vs-RE-Hard-Drives-601/

[Spikkel]

On 1/4/2018 at 4:00 PM, NelizMastr said:

This article might be of interest as a general idea of the differences between Black and RE/Gold

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Black-vs-RE-Hard-Drives-601/

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. Even though that article is old, Puget systems (A company I really like a lot) seems to have moved to WD reds in almost all their systems as a secondary drive (primary being an SSD obviously), and WD golds in the top tier systems. It seems the gold is overkill in a typical system but fits my priority as a highly reliable drive.

[cox1000]

I have used reds, blacks, and blues in my system before. So I'm going to give you my experiences with them, please not that they may not represent every drive produced, and the enterprise grade drives may well provide marginally better reliability. I have a few hard drives (12 in total), and that number has varied a fair bit thought out time. I have a storage server, which is power on and off when I need it, so this will be similar in load to running in a desktop. My experience of buying enterprise grade drives is that most of them don't last a great deal longer than a 'good' consumer drive. I have had Hitachi (before acquisition) ultrastar drives been outlived by cheap Seagate drives. With that said, I have not tried the new WD enterprise grade drives. All hard drives die, it's a fact, you can have a cheap hard drive last 10 years, and you can have a really expensive one die in a few months. 

 

I have had 2 black drives, and while they are faster than the others in the line-up (faster sequential and random performance), they run hotter and substantially louder. The current blue line-up consists of rebadged old greens with some firmware tweaks (5400 RPM Blues that is), and I think they have reduced the insane head parking frequency that used to kill them off quickly. Then, there are the old blue drives, which spin at 7200RPM, this is how they are differentiating them now. I have had 1 black die, and make a painful amount of noise in the process. 

 

The reds have always been very solid, although they do have a lower revolution speed (5400 RPM), which is something to consider if speed is important. I have never had one die, they are quiet and they run quite cool. 

 

The gold drives spin at 7200 RPM, and are rated for a longer period of operation before failure. These will most likely be on average the best drives to use if you just want it to work for as long as possible, regardless of the actual
price / gb / year. HGST also have drives available, and they might be worth considering. Their ultrastar drives are practically unrivalled when it comes to reliability, but they are more expensive. I have ultrastars from 2006 that are still spinning away happily (although of course, this is not a large enough sample size on which to make a decision).

 

It is also worth noting that backblaze (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q3-2017/), because they feel that the enterprise drives are more expensive, and the reliability gains are not that great. The link above is to the statistics of the length of time their drives last. It is very difficult to say what is the best value solution, and it does depend quite a lot on the price for which you purchase the drives, as well as luck. 

 

I personally think that WD reds would work just as well for you as WD Golds, and they come with 3 year warranties. Generally speaking, hard drives have a fairly high infancy mortality rate, which then decreases after a few months, and then finally increases again as the drive ages. So, if it lasts 3 years with no bad sectors, it will probably last a fair bit longer too.