Which colour WD for my WHS storage increase?

[Zak33]

Hi guys

I'm going to buy a 2TB, possibly a 3TB to drop into my WHS which is for OS back ups and Datas backup via Sync toy.

It goes on once every month and speed isn't major issue.

In it at the mo are a WD 1.5 TB green and a 2TB green, plus a little 320 GB WD that was the original OS drive.

So it's a mix already.

£ for £ for size and reliability, which is best? Blue? Green? red? I'm bemused!

[GoNz0]

If it isn't on all the time then green, if it is on all the time but idles and the controller supports spin down then green, if it is on 24/7 regardless of load and doesn't support spin down then red.

Blue are more for budget oriented low end systems as they are low capacity drives.

Also if you can afford it red as they are the better drives, red pro and gold are more for business systems stuck in racks unless you have lots of spare cash.

[jimborae]

You can do a simple hack on greens so that they dont park the heads, or what ever it is, so they act like reds. Then the only difference is the warranty. In my whs box I ran a mixture of both with absolutly no ill effects for years.

[jim]

It seems like the Greens aren't that easy to get hold of anyway right now.

I would go for Red unless the price was prohibitive, which at first glance it doesn't appear to be.

[Guy]

Another vote for Red. I've got 4x4TB Reds running in my Synology.

[directhex]

Green is the *worst* type for a storage server

[jimborae]

I found this article very helpful:

Hacking WD Greens(and Reds) with WDIDLE3.exe/

[peterb]

I found this article very helpful:

Hacking WD Greens(and Reds) with WDIDLE3.exe/

Thanks for this. I've just (2 days ago) replaced two failing Seagate drives with WD reds in a Linux based server. I might have bought green had I read it first, but then again, I was in a hurry to get the data onto a new RAID without messing around - and the extra year of warranty indicates WD have greater confidence in the drive.

Next task is to replace the remaining OS drive (Samsung branded Seagate)!

[DanceswithUnix]

I might have bought green had I read it first, but then again, I was in a hurry to get the data onto a new RAID without messing around - and the extra year of warranty indicates WD have greater confidence in the drive.

That page is a good rant, but I don't think there is anything on there that I would want to base a buying decision on.

Drives are really complex devices, cost reducing does happen and will happen against an expected use case so going against the intended use of a drive will always make me nervous.

If you are sticking drives in an array, always remember that vibration is the enemy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Proper enterprise drives have better bearings and different firmware to tune for a hostile environment, that shouldn't all be necessary for home use but drives can shake each other to destruction when used together if they are the wrong drive and solidly mounted to transmit vibrations around the group (like just bolting them into a chassis).

[peterb]

^ Oh yes, it does need to be read between the lines, but the detail was interesting once you got past the 'corporations are evil' theme! I don't regret buying the Reds (they have only been in for 36 hours, I might revisit this thread when the fail!)

But the Seagates are the first drives I have had that have failed in service. Normally I upgrade before failure occurs and they had been in service for 3 years (thinking about it, I had a WD drive fail, but I think that was damaged in transit as it was badly packed, but it didn't show up for about 12 months).

Not that my experience alone is statistically significant, but it probably will influence my future purchasing decisions. 😊

[DanceswithUnix]

..., but the detail was interesting once you got past the 'corporations are evil' theme!

Seemed to me he found a well known utility for playing with drive firmware settings, and used it to reinforce his preconceptions that everyone is trying to rip him off

One worry is that WD state that their warranty is invalidated if:

The product was not used in accordance with Western Digital specifications and instructions.
The product was not used for its intended function (for example, desktop drives used in an Enterprise environment).

So it isn't a case of you get an extra year of warranty for the Red drive, strictly speaking the green in a raid array gets you zero warranty. You would probably get away with it, but if you send the drive back WD can see you changed the idle settings and kept the drive on 24/7 so you could get told to get lost.

I look forward to SSDs hitting price parity, we sell flash by the petabyte at work so it always grates on me to be messing with spinning rust.

How are you finding your Red drives? Mine must be at the end of their warranty period now and have operated without a hitch, but they benefited from rubber mountings as they made a low hum noise when directly bolted to a chassis. I need to spec up some replacements, preferably bigger than the old 2TB ones.

[peterb]

So far so good. I haven't resiliently mounted them, but I can't hear anything from them. I have used Hitachi drives in the past, one server I fitted them to has an uptime in excess of 670 days and they were fitted 3 years ago without ( touch wood) missing a beat.

One thing I was impressed/relieved by is that although the disks are failing with sector faults, the resilience of ext3 seems to have preserved all my data. The OS disk is now running as a singleton on a degraded array while I get the configuration sorted out for an upgrade to FC23 on an SSD. Almost there, just postfix/dovecot being a tad troublesome.

[Zak33]

Green is the *worst* type for a storage server

even my type of "on for 6 hours once per month" storage Hex?

why? Cos they spin down? If so that's ok with me.. they go on.. get worked.. go off.

[DanceswithUnix]

even my type of "on for 6 hours once per month" storage Hex?

why? Cos they spin down? If so that's ok with me.. they go on.. get worked.. go off.

For that usage I suspect Toshiba drives might be the ones.

They are good value, seem decent quality. http://www.ebuyer.com/726224-toshiba...m-hdwd130uzsva

Now the warranty is only 2 years, which with your proposed usage is just 24 uses. A WD red with another 12 uses before the warranty runs out is another 25 quid, WD Black with the 5 year warranty for an entire 60 uses is £170 which seems poor value. But let's face it, with your usage pattern the odds seem in your favour (though I would perform a surface scan on delivery and check the reallocated sector count doesn't climb to make sure the couriers didn't play footy with it).

Edit to add: I think most if not all modern consumer drives spin down, the difference is after 8 seconds or after 5 minutes. Even before they did that as standard, my Linux box used to use the hdparm utility to make them do it because in those days disks were loud.

[neonplanet40]

I am quite a fan of WD reds and blacks. Most of my drives are one or the other. Reds are great for storage though (blacks have longer warranty - or used to anyway lol)