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Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium Member
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS

Anav to Kitlope

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to Kitlope

Re: Hard Drive Deals

Oh okay, on site, is much different from online. Of course and your charming to boot.

milnoc
join:2001-03-05
Ottawa

milnoc to elwoodblues

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Does anybody know if you can use a Western Digital Red drive in a desktop computer? My machines are running 24 hours per day with mostly low demands, and I need something that can run properly under such an environment.

I currently have a 1 TB Hitachi Deskstar which is almost full, and has been running for 5 years now. Apparently, Hitachi had built their Deskstar line to run 24 hours. Unfortunately, Hitachi's 2 TB drive seems to be out of stock everywhere, and discontinued.

Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium Member
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS

Anav

Premium Member

I saw 2TB WD reds on sale maybe new egg, around $119 or so??

milnoc
join:2001-03-05
Ottawa

milnoc

Member

Yes, I saw that one. But can you use it in a desktop system? All the literature and review sites talk about the drive's NAS capabilities (its primary use), but not a word if you can use it as a mass storage drive in a PC (my OS drive will be a SSD).

Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium Member
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS

Anav

Premium Member

Good question what is the diff between green blue red black anyway......??

»wdc.custhelp.com/app/ans ··· and-raid

From other forums...
If you are looking for the fastest drives in a workstation, I would stick to the Black drive.

Blue are for Solid performance and reliability for everyday computing.

Green are for Cool, quiet operation for efficient eco-conscious computing.

Black are for Maximum performance for power computing.

Red are for 24x7 operating environment and demanding system requirements of home and small office NAS.

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

A Red is just a Green with TLER enabled for RAID 5. They work fine in desktop systems.

milnoc
join:2001-03-05
Ottawa

milnoc

Member

Not quite. The Reds have a MTBF rate of a million hours, and are made to run 24/7. WD DOESN'T recommend running the Greens 24/7! Or the Blues for that matter. Haven't found anything negative on the Blacks.

As for running a Red in a desktop system, have you or someone you know actually tried this?

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

The MTBF of the Green is 300,000 hours, which is still over 34 years of 24/7 operation. WD may say not to use a Green for 24/7 operation, but that doesn't mean it won't work and it doesn't mean they won't honour your warranty if you do. The Red is similar to the AV-GP, which in of itself is a very minor variation of the Green, particularly in the area of vibration dampening.

And seriously dude, ask yourself - why couldn't you run a Red in a desktop? That should answer your question. Sure, they have TLER, but so do other high-end drives you can run in a workstation as a single drive (e.g. the Raptor). I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

milnoc
join:2001-03-05
Ottawa

milnoc

Member

I don't want to guess with this. I need confirmation from someone who's actually tried it.

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

This isn't a guess, this is basic understanding of hard drives. It makes no difference. If your hard drive suffers a read error in single drive mode that basic CRC correction in the OS can't fix you're already up shit creek as far as the data is concerned and should be replacing the drive anyway. TLER at that point becomes redundant, because all it does is give the RAID controller - which you won't have - the chance to try and fix it instead of the drive repeatedly retrying.

You've most likely owned hard drives in the past that had TLER enabled and didn't even know it. So seriously, quit you're worrying and buy the damn drive!

Last Parade
join:2002-10-07
Port Colborne, ON

Last Parade to milnoc

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to milnoc
said by milnoc:

I don't want to guess with this. I need confirmation from someone who's actually tried it.

Just throw 2 of them in RAID 1 if it bugs you.

Dones
join:2008-02-14
Toronto, ON

Dones to elwoodblues

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to elwoodblues
God damn it. My hard drive just failed and now I found out that I've missed the 3TB drive for 89.99. Should I even bother walking into a Canada computers?

Last Parade
join:2002-10-07
Port Colborne, ON

Last Parade

Member

said by Dones:

God damn it. My hard drive just failed and now I found out that I've missed the 3TB drive for 89.99. Should I even bother walking into a Canada computers?

I was told that even though their stock indicated they had 1-2 drives by 6pm on Black Friday, they had been working from their "local server" all day and most stores ran out by 11am on Friday.

TLS2000
Premium Member
join:2004-02-24
Elmsdale, NS

TLS2000

Premium Member

That wouldn't surprise me. The line up at the Mississauga store was huge.

milnoc
join:2001-03-05
Ottawa

milnoc to Last Parade

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to Last Parade
said by Last Parade:

Just throw 2 of them in RAID 1 if it bugs you.

Shuttle case. No more room left once I add the SSD.

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone to Last Parade

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to Last Parade
said by Last Parade:

Just throw 2 of them in RAID 1 if it bugs you.

TLER on software/firmware RAID - which is like 90% of the RAID out there, including cheap add-in cads and anything integrated onto a motherboard - is just as redundant as it is in a single drive configuration. Not only that, but most NAS devices use software raid at some level, usually md or something like that, which is equally as redundant. TLER becomes important with dedicated RAID 5 controllers, meaning that you'll probably end up seeing Dell rate these drives for use in Poweredge servers and stuff like that.

I really don't know why people are freaking out about using these Reds in a desktop. They're nothing more than a WD Green (or AV-GP, depending on who you ask) that's been hardened in a fashion similar to the RE4. For 90% of the people out there, there's no advantage to the Red over the Green - including in NAS boxes - other than them being quieter and better power optimizations (I don't buy the vibration claims, but whatever), but that doesn't mean you can't use one in place of a Green on a desktop, and in fact if they were the same price the Red would be the better drive to get.

urbanriot
Premium Member
join:2004-10-18
Canada

urbanriot

Premium Member

said by Gone:

For 90% of the people out there, there's no advantage to the Red over the Green - including in NAS boxes - other than them being quieter and better power optimizations

Red's are faster too, Red 145 MB/s vs. Green 123 MB/s.

Red's claim 1,000,000 MTBF and 24x7 uptime, while Green's are not posted and no idea if the uptime works out just the same.

No idea if that validates or invalidates what you're saying, just did some investigating as I was curious if there were differences or not.

I might be against the grain concerning TLER as I prefer to leave it enabled on hardware RAID. I want a drive to drop out if it suggests it has an issue so I can take it out and check it before it wipes out an array. After many, many years of dealing with broken RAID5 arrays, I've learned that a flaky drive can obliterate the data on an array as it works/doesn't work while TLER (or increasing a controller's sensitivity to drive issue) alerts you before you experience the problem. Philosophical debate but my rationale has lead to positive experiences with drive removals in advance of failure.

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

The Reds are faster because they use the 1TB platters. So are the Blues. The Greens and the Blacks are still using 500GB. Once Greens get the higher density platters their performance will most likely increase to something identical to what the Reds are getting now, and the Blacks will blow anything else on the market out of the water. MTBF on the Greens are 300,000 hours, which is still a lot of freakin hours, more than 30 years as I said earlier.

And yeah, your point about TLER is perfectly valid and you are by no means unique in that school of thought. All these people going goo goo gaa gaa over TLER don't realize that it's not all a bed of roses, and that when they throw it into whatever consumer NAS appliance they've purchased thinking they're getting real RAID they're most likely not, and that TLER in that situation will be completely and totally redundant anyway. The silly thing is that there is no official way to disable TLER on the Red, and that it's a bit of a kludge to actually get it fully disabled. Stupid move on the part of WD if you ask me.

All in all, the Red is a brilliant marketing move on the part of WD.

milnoc
join:2001-03-05
Ottawa

milnoc

Member

A quote from the following link (emphasis is mine):

»www.anandtech.com/show/6 ··· remium/2
quote:
Western Digital has well-defined product categories for each market segment. The WD Black series caters to those requiring a lot of performance without power concerns. The Green series serves the opposite end of the spectrum, where performance is not that much of an issue (secondary drives for PCs / external enclosures), but heat and power could do with some reduction. The Blue series served the middle tier (everyday computing with optimal performance) and the notebook market. However, none of these models are recommended by WD for 24x7 operation (which happens to be an essential requirement for almost all NAS systems). Till now, none of the HDD vendors have anything specific for SMB / SOHO NAS systems. WD aims to capture this segment of the market with the WD Red lineup.
The MTBF for the Green drives only applies if the drive is used according to the manufacturer's recommended usage. For the Greens, that means non-24/7 usage.

The same link also shows how to change the TLER setting on the drive, or turn it off altogether. But along with knowing if the Reds can be used in a desktop system, I would also like to know what are the optimum settings for the intended usage.

Of course, this doesn't mean the drive won't fail in a few years. But it would be nice to get the drive working properly as soon as I get it so that I don't spend countless hours doing "trial and error" work just to get the bloody thing working in the first place.

Gone, do you understand why I ask these questions and prefer answers that are slightly more than a sentence long and backed by proper evidence? I'd rather spend my time earning money working for my clients than earning nothing working on vague hunches.

urbanriot
Premium Member
join:2004-10-18
Canada

urbanriot

Premium Member

I'd like to know why WD, Qnap and a few other companies claim the Red drives are 'more compatible' than Green, Blue, or Black drives in NAS devices unless that's marketing speak for the reasons Gone outlined above.

There may be additional firmware adjustments to the Red drives as I've seen people have issues with WD's other drive series in NAS bays, which is what I interpreted as the reason for the Red line. WD had a reputation for NAS incompatibility for some time.

On a personal level, I've used Green 3TB's in RAID5 configurations in my home servers for a few years now, without issue. Specifically the WD30EZRX x 20 drives (14 for two years, recently added 6 more). I haven't used wdidle as I don't mind the heads parking when I'm not using the system.

One of my RE's failed after about 3 years in a 6 drive set, WD1002FBYS specifically. Well, it didn't outright fail but one of them is causing the array to go offline... migrating data as we speak so I can low level format then MHDD them, figure out which one's misbehaving.

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone to milnoc

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to milnoc
said by milnoc:

Gone, do you understand why I ask these questions and prefer answers that are slightly more than a sentence long and backed by proper evidence? I'd rather spend my time earning money working for my clients than earning nothing working on vague hunches.

I have enough experience with hard drives and know enough about how they interact with an OS to know that you won't run into issues. If that's not good enough for you I'm obviously not going to convince you of anything different, but that doesn't mean that I think you're being any more reasonable in your quest for already-readily-known-and-available knowledge.

I get the feeling that unless you buy the damn drive and try for yourself, you'll never think it's good enough. So just buy a Green or - if you "need" some official sort of 24/7 and MTBF numbers that are ultimately meaningless as far as real-world reliability and quality goes - an AV-GP and be done with it.
Gone

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Gone to urbanriot

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to urbanriot
said by urbanriot:

There may be additional firmware adjustments to the Red drives as I've seen people have issues with WD's other drive series in NAS bays, which is what I interpreted as the reason for the Red line. WD had a reputation for NAS incompatibility for some time.

That was by and large due to AF on the EARS Green drives. The Reds are also AF, so the same NAS bays that issues with an EARS Green are also going to have issues with a Red. That being said, it's unlikely that any NAS bay built in the last two years is going to have an issue with an AF drive.

I remember I had a hell of a time with an EARS drive on an older Dell RAID controller a few years back, too. Put it on a newer controller, rebuilt the array and reformatted everything - boom no issue.

The Reds are quieter, vibration hardened (though how much is anyone's guess, and I feel this is something more for marketing more than anything else) and use less power and therefore produce less heat. These kind of qualities are ideal for a NAS drive, but I doubt there's anything beyond that which makes them absolutely necessary for NAS use. A WD AV-GP would be just as good if you don't need TLER - to which, 90% of the people out there including those using them in NAS bays *don't* need it.
said by urbanriot:

On a personal level, I've used Green 3TB's in RAID5 configurations in my home servers for a few years now, without issue. Specifically the WD30EZRX x 20 drives (14 for two years, recently added 6 more). I haven't used wdidle as I don't mind the heads parking when I'm not using the system.
One of my RE's failed after about 3 years in a 6 drive set, WD1002FBYS specifically. Well, it didn't outright fail but one of them is causing the array to go offline... migrating data as we speak so I can low level format then MHDD them, figure out which one's misbehaving.

I'm glad you pointed this out, since an RE is a 24/7 1M MTFB drive, while the Greens are supposedly not designed for 24/7 use and only have a MTBF of 300,000 hours. Just goes to show that when it comes down to it, all those numbers are gobblygook as far as real world experience and reliability goes.

urbanriot
Premium Member
join:2004-10-18
Canada

urbanriot

Premium Member

said by Gone:

The Reds are quieter, vibration hardened (though how much is anyone's guess, and I feel this is something more for marketing more than anything else)

You could test the tolerance for vibration if you were curious. Take an older IDE hard drive, a newer laptop hard drive and a newer SATA drive and start a sector latency scan on three monitors using something like MHDD and watch the effect of pounding your fist on the desk you're scanning with.

Between each of those you can see a visual result in how they react. It might not sound technical since there's no testing control for the force of your fist with each hit, but each one of those drives has a greater variance displayed than a regular pounding would produce.

If the Red looks the same as a Green, then this 'tolerance' is probably BS.

I evaluated the WD RE's in a similar fashion when they debut to see if they were worth the exorbitantly high premium at the time (they were as far as vibration goes)

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

That's actually not a bad idea. As far as I know the Reds are "vibration hardened" the same way the REs are, so if you were to perform the same test on them now that would probably be true. I just take issue with the way WD is marketing this feature, claiming that it will make drives live longer in a NAS when it's probably not true at all considering the success a lot of people have had with Greens. What I have heard - but not observed myself - is that the Reds are so quiet and so still when running that the only noise you hear is a "weird" spinup sound, and then dead silence even when seeking. That would make me want one of them for a desktop for the quietness alone.

TOPDAWG
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join:2005-04-27
Calgary, AB

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missed the 3TB no money and they had no stock at the Barrie Canada computers anyway. I'll guess they will be the same price again during boxing day.

Guspaz
Guspaz
MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC

Guspaz to urbanriot

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said by urbanriot:

On a personal level, I've used Green 3TB's in RAID5 configurations in my home servers for a few years now, without issue. Specifically the WD30EZRX x 20 drives (14 for two years, recently added 6 more). I haven't used wdidle as I don't mind the heads parking when I'm not using the system.

The problem isn't that the head parks, it's that it parks way too fast.

My green drives in my file server, on which I didn't use wdidle, have a start/stop count of over half a million, which is most of their lifespan already gone. You can use wdidle to set them to something reasonable so that this doesn't happen. Thirty seconds, for example.

urbanriot
Premium Member
join:2004-10-18
Canada

urbanriot

Premium Member

Way too fast for what? Successive accesses? I use mine to store large pieces of data that I don't continually re-access after 8 second pauses so it doesn't really bother me. I think the last time I checked, the drives were at a few hundred thousand parks which was okay for me after a 1.5 year period.

Guspaz
Guspaz
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join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC

Guspaz to elwoodblues

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Way too fast for any sane purpose. A few hundred thousand parks is way more than a drive should have for an 18 month period, taking your drives much closer to death's door than they need to be. The fact that you're seeing those sorts of numbers indicates that your usage patterns aren't nearly as seldom-accessed as you think; 300k parks after 18 months equates to something like 550 parks per day, or a park every roughly three minutes.

urbanriot
Premium Member
join:2004-10-18
Canada

urbanriot

Premium Member

That doesn't really concern me. I'm not looking for these drives to work for more than a few more years.

Gone
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join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone to Guspaz

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to Guspaz
said by Guspaz:

Way too fast for any sane purpose. A few hundred thousand parks is way more than a drive should have for an 18 month period, taking your drives much closer to death's door than they need to be. The fact that you're seeing those sorts of numbers indicates that your usage patterns aren't nearly as seldom-accessed as you think; 300k parks after 18 months equates to something like 550 parks per day, or a park every roughly three minutes.

I believe WD is on the record saying that a high number of head parks shouldn't be an issue, as they park completely and totally different than a traditional drive would. In other words, the drive is no closer to death's door than any other drive would in similar circumstances.