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?
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?