WD 3.5" HDD Blue or Green?

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bencho

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Hello,

What would be the best line of WD hard drives for "cold" storage? I'm looking at two 4TB drives that would be powered up for manual backups approximately once per month, then turned back off.

Would WD Blues or Greens be better? Blacks have a longer warranty but would that be a factor for drives that are rarely used?


Thank you,
 
I prefer reds for storage and blacks if it's going to be used as a boot drive or to run programs from. I avoid blues and greens for reliability reasons, IME they're not much more reliable than seagate 7200.11s.

HGST seems to be making some reliable drives too right now but I'm not as familiar with their lineup.
 
I thought Reds were designed to be on 24/7? Something about parking the heads and spinning down causing wear (on like microscopic levels but additive over time).
If they are fine with once a month boot ups then thats the way I'll go~
 
bencho said:
I thought Reds were designed to be on 24/7? Something about parking the heads and spinning down causing wear (on like microscopic levels but additive over time).
If they are fine with once a month boot ups then thats the way I'll go~
Click to expand...

Yeah they're designed to not spin down for NAS use but they also use them in their external enclosures so I wouldn't think that's an issue. I do think the HGST drives might be worth looking into.
 
What is the value in HGST?
From a price point, 4TB Reds and HGST appear similar

*update* - nevermind, HGST appears to be a lil faster, but Reds are less expensive and run quieter
 
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What is the value in HGST?
Click to expand...

Significantly better reliability. With that said any drive (no matter how much you pay or how much you use it) can fail at any time from being DOA to its expected 5 year lifespan to beyond.
 
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Ebernanut said:
I prefer reds for storage and blacks if it's going to be used as a boot drive or to run programs from. I avoid blues and greens for reliability reasons, IME they're not much more reliable than seagate 7200.11s.

HGST seems to be making some reliable drives too right now but I'm not as familiar with their lineup.
Click to expand...
BAD idea to run reds as single drives. They're designed to be used in NASes as part of a RAID array so they've got TLER turned on so they'll give up on any weak or bad sectors easily.
 
FnordMan said:
BAD idea to run reds as single drives. They're designed to be used in NASes as part of a RAID array so they've got TLER turned on so they'll give up on any weak or bad sectors easily.
Click to expand...


Bad sectors are fairly uncommon and recovery of bad sectors after the first couple tries is even less common, if you have sectors going bad you have big issues regardless of whether the drive has TLER or deep error recovery. Reds are some of the most reliable non-enterprise drives available, especially compared to the blues and greens. I have heard good things about the HGST drives which is why I recommended the OP look into them, I'm not as familiar with them myself though.

The only recommendation I've heard in relation to the reds is that if you're using it in a desktop then it's a good idea to disable spindown since they're designed more for spinning 24/7 than constantly spinning up and down. Since OP is planning to run them infrequently I don't think that's an issue.
 
Another + for HGST NAS is they come retailed boxed thus they are highly protected instead of bare drive in some cardboard sleeve.

I run two sets of HGST NAS in raid1 for almost 2 years now, quiet and rock solid.
 
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