Technical > PC Hardware Discussion/Reviews > [My Review] WD Caviar Red (WD10EFRX)

[My Review] WD Caviar Red (WD10EFRX)

Great writeup koitsu, thanks.

Do you zero all your new drives end to end with dd?

Yup. I actually follow this procedure (written for people using Windows; obviously the method I use is dd on an *IX box, etc...):

»Re: Repair or Replace Disk Warning on Brand New WD Caviar Black.

There's a lot of logic behind why I do what I do there.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

We should roll a bootable CD that automates your standard procedure.

I don't think it'd benefit end users much, since it requires familiarity with how to read/interpret SMART statistics (not to mention everything else SMART-related ), and if issues are encountered, further manual tests + tinkering to get further details. For example, I do my testing on a FreeBSD box but my actual workstation is a Windows machine (e.g. PuTTY/SSH'd to FreeBSD box then I do my work from there). If I encounter issues I then have a GUI + tools + Internet connection and so on I can use.

Otherwise those familiar with Linux and other *IXes can accomplish basically the same thing with any LiveCD distro out there (Knoppix, etc.) as long as it has dd and smartmontools (and many do), and possibly X + GUI + network support.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

reply to koitsu
"DD"?

Oh, I see, it is a nix command, reading about it now, I'm a little confused but have some idea. Sorry to take thread afield.

Koitsu, you use BSD. Why BSD rather than some flavor of Linux? Note, I have never used BSD and don't know it. PM me please if this is going OT!

I read your blog submission and it sounds pretty cool, almost as though having a red rather than a black is not a gimp. I don't understand a lot of command syntax, command syntax is still a black art to me, I have yet to learn chmod, doh!

reply to koitsu
Hah hah, dude, you are a genius! But I see, BSD was around and established when Linux was Torvalds and friends, so I can comprehend THAT!

BTW, I found a nice explanation of DD: »www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/10/dd-···xamples/

As with all nix, pretty damned powerful command. It is time I started learning the command syntax and stopped being intimidated by it, seriously! Boy this interwebs thingy is amazing when you figure out how to use it, doh!
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Join Teams Helix and Discovery. Rest in Peace, Leonard David Smith, my best friend, you are missed badly! Rest in peace, Pop, glad our last years were good. Please pray for Colin, he has ependymoma, a brain cancer, donate to a children's Hospital.

There is dd for Win32 which you can use too, but many of the features on the *IX versions don't exist in it. However, for copying data and doing other normal things, it absolutely does the job. I tend to trust it more than I do GUI applications, heh. Don't let anyone tell you to go install Cygwin just for dd either -- utter overkill.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

reply to koitsu
What do you mean my "MHDD" in your blog post?

Probably Mechanical Hard Disk Drive, as opposed to SSD.

Correct.

reply to koitsu
Brief follow-up: I updated my blog post today to reflect addition of some very minor benchmarks.

I'm going to quote my own blog to drive this one point home:

What applications would you say the red drives is appropriate for? I take it it is a decent choice for a data and some programs drive, or in other words, the second drive of a home/SOHO system. But I black or SSD is still advised for OS drive, si?

What I mean is I understand this is a storage drive, should it only be used for NAS and such? Forgive me that I have no experience with NAS setups...

I think the red drive is a reasonably low power drive, but without some of the irritating and extreme features of the green drives. I think they're good for just about anything except:
a) when high performance is needed
b) the lowest possible power consumption is needed due to some thing such as insufficient cooling
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Wacky Races 2012!

reply to koitsu
Incidentally, how many platters on the black drives, for the 1 TB and 2 TB models?

Oh, and these aren't red because they are blushing, are they? (Ok, stupid humor)

reply to koitsu
Guess what review Anandtech floated today:

»www.anandtech.com/show/6157/west···-premium

reply to signmeuptoo

reply to sbconslt

reply to koitsu
You know what surprises me? Seagate doesn't seem to market drives in a similar way to this (blue, black, red, green) and I'm thinking it MUST be helping WD in sales and better qualifying consumers to the right matching product...