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pgjscottieuk

Guide

Apr 19, 2017

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HDD Reliability chart

This is a chart which is a follow up to myself mentioning WD drives are not as reliable as i had previously thought

Hard Disk

JennC
Apr 19, 2017
Hello pgjscottieuk,

Thank you for sharing your information, resolution and/or workaround. We appreciate your contribution to the community.

Feel free to post any suggestions, questions, recommendations or anything about your NAS that you think needs attention or will help others.

Regards,

miogpsrocks

Tutor

Apr 21, 2017

I would like to know if the RED drives fail less than a regular WD drive with various colors of the rainbow.

Personally, I think it's a little silly to have all these different color drives. Can we just have a regular drive then maybe an enterprise drive that spins faster or something?

Anyway, RED are supposed to be for RAID, I would like to know if they are any better.

Thanks.

Sandshark

Sensei - Experienced User

Apr 21, 2017

miogpsrocks wrote:

Personally, I think it's a little silly to have all these different color drives. Can we just have a regular drive then maybe an enterprise drive that spins faster or something?

Then you know little about hard drives. Ignore such use-specific engineering at your own risk. It really is engineering, not hype.

The colors are to make it easier on the consumer to choose the right class of drive as specific model numbers change. Very smart on WD's part, I believe. Very pro-consumer, especially for the average not-so-technical ones.

There are Enterprise, Desktop, NAS, Surveillance, and Archive drive types. Each is designed with a specific class of use in mind. The NAS drive is a cost vs. reliability middle ground between desktop and enterprise. Multiple drives spinning in a common housing create both heat and vibration issues. Aggressive auto spin-down for energy savings can cause problems in a RAID. But many NAS owners are not willing to pay for (and don't need the reliability of) an enterprise drive. But they do need to stay away from drives that may cause problems in a NAS. Thus were born the NAS-purposed (Red in the WD rainbow) drives. More reliable in a multi-drive RAID configuration than desktop models but cheaper and mostly lower power (thus lower temperature, a huge factor in reliability) than enterprise. WD learned this the hard way in the early years of the Green drives when folks put them in NASes and other RAID arrays and they caused all kinds of problems. WD got the blame when it was really users chosing the wrong drive.

When I bought my first Infrant ReadyNAS NV, I really would have liked the option of NAS-purposed drives. Knowing desktop drives could have problems in a NAS, I went with the significantly more expensive (moreso than today) enterprise drives. Some 10 years later, all four are still working and had few or no bad sectors when I retired them from full-time use. But I have little use for those power-hungry 500GB behemoths (they were quite heavy compared to desktop drives, probably for vibration abatement). So the extra money for enterprise drives over NAS drives (had they been available) would likley not have been money well spent. I didn't need them to still be working today. Was it worth the money over desktop drives since NAS ones weren't available? I think so. My second NAS, a Netgear NV+, had desktop drives and 2 of 4 failed in the warranty period. I don't think any are alive today.

I suspect that WD changed from "Green" to "Blue" for low-power desktop drives because "Green" is used generically for "low power -- good for the environment" and WD did not want to get caught up in a trademark issue where a competitor could claim that "Green" could not be trademarked because of prior generic use.

miogpsrocks
Tutor
Apr 21, 2017
The I.T. manager of my company told me that RAID is what allowed corporations to make use on standard off the shelf consumer hard drives vs using the enterprise level drives. Any drive is supposed to be ok for RAID however the problem is these so called green drives are absolute garbage.

They should call these garbage drives. They are like the dollar store product of hard drives which are the bottom of the class. They are the worse of the worse and I don't think they last in any situation even in a computer as a nonprimary drive.

Almost everytime I have had a drive fail, it was always been green. To add insult to injury, they don't even save that much power especially to justify having your family pictures wiped out over. Besides the green drive, I think that any drive should work in a RAID system. Especially when they are in home use and not being used 24/7. I have my system set to spin down after 60 minutes of no use.

Anyway, have you found that the RED drives last longer than a standard like Seagate or Hitachi desktop drive?

Thanks.
- cpu8088
  Virtuoso
  Apr 21, 2017
  miogpsrocks wrote:
  The I.T. manager of my company told me that RAID is what allowed corporations to make use on standard off the shelf consumer hard drives vs using the enterprise level drives.
  are u sure about that?
  raid demand the best enterprise grade hard drives not desktop drives
- StephenB
  Guru - Experienced User
  Apr 21, 2017
  miogpsrocks wrote:
  
  The I.T. manager of my company told me that RAID is what allowed corporations to make use on standard off the shelf consumer hard drives vs using the enterprise level drives.
  
  Back in the 80s, mainframe disks were the size of washing machines and had ~400 MB capacity. Those weren't suitable for PCs or workstations, and lower-performing but much smaller hard drives (5.25" winchester technology of 10-20 MB capacity) were developed for PCs.
  
  In 1987 some folks at Berkeley invented RAID, and presented a paper in 1988 "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)", which did argue that arrays of small winchester drives could out-perform the mainframe drives of the time.
  
  So your IT manager is mostly correct on the history - but the drive technologies he was talking about are long-gone. The distinction was between mainframe drives and PC drives - the modern distinction between enterprise and consumer drives didn't exist. Back then mainframe drives and consumer drives were completely different beasts, that is not the case with modern enterprise and consumer drives.
  
  miogpsrocks wrote:
  
  Anyway, have you found that the RED drives last longer than a standard like Seagate or Hitachi desktop drive?
  
  .
  
  Not sure what makes "Seagate" a standard, but "Western Digital" is not. Hitachi's disk drive business was sold to Western Digital some years ago.
  
  But to your question - I began purchasing WD Reds in late 2012, and I have several in my Pro-6 that have ~36000 hours of usage. Overall, I have 14 of them deployed in various NAS (WD20EFRX, WD30EFRX, WD60EFRX, WD80EFZX). I've found them to be quite reliable - if memory serves, one has failed. One or two others might have had out-of-the-box issues and were exchanged before putting them in service - not sure.
  
  As far as Seagates go, my experience there was not so good. I had quite a few early Seagate drives in the 1-2TB size range that all failed about the same time. I think those quality issues were specific to those early models, but I switched over to WDC anyway.
  
  I think the WDC Reds and Red Pros and the Seagate equivalents (Ironwolf, Ironwolf Pro) are both good choices for NAS owners.
  
  Owners of Hitachi drives who've posted here liked them, and didn't report much trouble. But that tech has been integrated into WDC drives, and I haven't seen a new hitachi-branded model in quite some time.
  
  I don't recommend green drives (or general consumer drives) - NAS-purposed are better choices than consumer drives, are similarly priced, and have better warranties. That said, my NV+ is running happily with its original set of WD green drives (EADS).