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Deciphering current line-up of WD HDDs (Western Digital Hard Disk Drives)

ToTo Man

the band not the dog
It's been a few years since I last bought an internal 3.5" SATA HDD. Last time I did, WD had just rebranded their lines, e.g. the Green line had been converged with the Blue line. At that time, 8TB and 10TB Reds had not long come out and I was considering an 8TB, but after reading reports of higher rates of failure in >6TB drives due to helium leakage, I decided to stick with the 6TB size.

A few years on, I'm assuming these issues have been resolved, or at least I'm hoping they have been, as I have exhausted my 6TB capacity and am getting tired of storing different content across multiple drives as it makes backing up a PITA.

When I now look at the WD site, the Red line now only goes up to 6TB. If you want 8TB or higher, you need a Red Plus, Red Pro, Black, Gold, or Purple.

It was confusing enough differentiating between the different lines before but now it's a joke.

Before I spend the best part of a day Googling for answers, can someone tell me what the closest line is to my existing WD Green/Blue 5400rpm drives in terms of performance and reliability? I won't be using the drives for NAS, they will be used for the following:
- internal storage drive in my Mac Pro storing ripped music and video
- external enclosure connected to my Mac Mini connected by firewire storing ripped music and video
- backing up said data and storing offsite

I've been using 6TB Green and 6TB Blue drives for this for years without issues (touch wood!) so I'd rather not have to pay a premium for additional performance benefits I'm not going to notice. I also understand that certain 'colours' of WD drives are optimised for a specific function that makes them less suited/reliable for use as a standard internal read/write drive inside a computer, so I assume I should avoid these?
 
I really don't know anymore - perhaps that's the point! The clues used to be in the letter codes at the end of the serial numbers - if they were different then the drives were different. Look at the Amazon pictures and compare cheaper model with the more expensive ones...
 
According to this site, Red is best for reads and can only be used for NAS, Purple is best for writes, Blue/Black/Gold is best for overall use with the Gold having the best performance and reliability. I can't seem to find any 8TB Blacks at a reasonable price (even the WD store doesn't have any in stock), so it looks like it'll need to be a Gold.

Where do you normally buy your drives from? Amazon is almost always the cheapest by a significant margin but IME they have a tendency to throw the foil-bagged drive into an oversized boxed without any packaging, - I cringe when I think how many bumps it's sustained in transit!...
 
Where do you normally buy your drives from? Amazon is almost always the cheapest by a significant margin but IME they have a tendency to throw the foil-bagged drive into an oversized boxed without any packaging, - I cringe when I think how many bumps it's sustained in transit!...

I buy from Amazon - and they exchange without question in my experience
 
Basically:
  • WD Blue: General purpose storage. 7200 rpm.
  • WD Green: Eco friendly. Quieter. Slower - IntelliPower variable speed 5400-7200 rpm.
  • WD Black: Fast.
  • WD Red: NAS drive array 1 - 5 disks. Special Firmware. 24/7 use.
  • WD Purple: CCTV
  • WD Gold: Data Centre
I buy from Amazon or Ebuyer usually. WD Red Pro go into our NAS boxes and Servers. No longer use spinning disks in PC's and Laptops - Samsung EVO or WD Black SSD for those.

Beware some of the Red drives are SMR not CMR - WD got pulled up for pulling a fast one to save cash - the model number tells you which is CMR

https://www.extremetech.com/computi...-comes-clean-shares-which-hard-drives-use-smr

The reason SMR is considered inferior to CMR for many applications is because SMR drives place tracks more closely together than their CMR counterparts.

 
i bought some 8 reds for my NAS earlier this year, and stuck the old 4 reds in my desktop PC. Seems to be working ok
WD Red would be fine for PC's, in general a lot dearer than Blue so not a normal use case, perfectly fine as a repurposing exercise I'd think. They spin slower than Blue or Blacks and can be a bit noisier too, not as bad as the old 10,000rpm Raptors.
 
I recall reading a few years ago that Reds contain firmware that conflicts with the typical usage of an internal computer drive used to boot O/S, frequent read/write requests, and error correction. Apparently drives such as Red and Gold that are designed for RAID don't attempt to repair bad sectors because it would cause the RAID system to fail due to time lag. This means that when using this type of drive in a non-RAID environment, data loss is more likely?

I wish they would make Blues in higher capacity than 6TB, - it would make choosing a drive for general purpose data storage much simpler.
 
It’s called TLER or CCTL if you want to look it up, error recovery within a certain time period. You can still use those drives in a desktop and they will work OK, best as a data drive rather than a boot disk. You can turn it off sometimes via hacks or utilities, basically they give up trying to fix errors so the RAID array doesn’t degrade.
 
To clarify if you are using the drive to hold the OS and boot from you need to pay attention to the tech, if you are using as a data tank it’s not critical. I read your post as you want a big drive rather than multiples to simply things but not clear if you want to boot to it as well. Any reason a NAS is off the radar, does make central storage, serving data and on the fly expansion down the line as per GT without data loss an option.
 
To clarify if you are using the drive to hold the OS and boot from you need to pay attention to the tech, if you are using as a data tank it’s not critical. I read your post as you want a big drive rather than multiples to simply things but not clear if you want to boot to it as well. Any reason a NAS is off the radar, does make central storage, serving data and on the fly expansion down the line as per GT without data loss an option.
Apologies for the confusion. Yes the drive will be used for storing and accessing large amounts of data on a regular basis (i.e. my iTunes and video libraries) not for booting the O/S. However, my O/S drives are now 10+ years old (my Mac Mini is a 2010 model and my Mac Pro dates from 2008!) so are likely on borrowed time, but if/when they go I'll probably just replace them with a low capacity 7200rpm WD Blue or an SSD if an SSD will work in machines of such vintage.

Regarding NAS, I suppose I'm afraid of the unknown and I'm wary of NAS software managing things. The way I do things now is clunky but at least I fully understand and am in full control it. Also, I don't think my videos are in a format that lends itself to being 'served'. They are straight VIDEO_TS rips of DVDs that can only be viewed using the 'DVD Player' app. I'd probably need to convert them to another format using Handbrake and I don't think I have the patience or HDD space for this. It would be good though as it would presumably mean the rest of the family could view this content via an AppleTV without needing to use a computer?
 
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Amber, very useful info regarding capabilities and description of the various WD drives. Sure that it will come in handy for many people deciding which items to purchase.
 
For a NAS only WD Black will do IMHO. Never had a failure/bad sector in at least a dozen HDD's over the last decade.
 
Interesting. My new 8TB arrived today to replace an old 1TB that was almost full. The 1TB stored part of my image files and yesterday I copied everything off of it to a holding folder. I installed the new 8TB and the copy back is ongoing. It is running over twice as fast as the old one.
 
Apologies for the confusion. Yes the drive will be used for storing and accessing large amounts of data on a regular basis (i.e. my iTunes and video libraries) not for booting the O/S. However, my O/S drives are now 10+ years old (my Mac Mini is a 2010 model and my Mac Pro dates from 2008!) so are likely on borrowed time, but if/when they go I'll probably just replace them with a low capacity 7200rpm WD Blue or an SSD if an SSD will work in machines of such vintage.

Regarding NAS, I suppose I'm afraid of the unknown and I'm wary of NAS software managing things. The way I do things now is clunky but at least I fully understand and am in full control it. Also, I don't think my videos are in a format that lends itself to being 'served'. They are straight VIDEO_TS rips of DVDs that can only be viewed using the 'DVD Player' app. I'd probably need to convert them to another format using Handbrake and I don't think I have the patience or HDD space for this. It would be good though as it would presumably mean the rest of the family could view this content via an AppleTV without needing to use a computer?

Or you could play the video ts files in plex on your phone and flick them to a chromecast on the back of the telly.
 


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