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Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

anarchoi
Aspirant

Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

I own two ReadyNas 4 Pro and i'm about to upgrade my drives to 4tb. Now i need to decide if i take WD Red drives or just go with the Seagate 4TB which is almost $50 cheaper.

Is there any reason why it would be worth spending $50 more on each drives, beside the 3 years WD warranty versus 2 years for Seagate ?

I use my NAS for storing movies and streaming them to my HTPC, so i don't really care about transfer speed or whatever.

I turn my NAS on only when i want to watch movies, usually it isn't working 24/7.

I'm currently using WD GREEN drives and i like that the drives will go into "sleep" aka power saving mode when my NAS is inactive but i heard that it is really not recommended for NAS use so i'm a bit worried about even if i never had any problem with them and never had a single one fail on me (in over 3 years of use)

On another subject, is there any ETA on the 5TB drives ? At first they were announced for the end of 2013 but they're still not here... I was waiting for them to upgrade my drives but it's taking sooo long...
Message 1 of 10
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

WD green drives aren't recommended. If you must spin down the drives use the disk spin-down feature in Frontview or the power off/on schedule or power off the NAS manually when you stop using it. The NAS needs to control disks spinning down. If you use Green disks when they go to sleep the NAS will try to wake it up because it is not responding. Excessive spinning up and down of drives shortens its life. In some cases it still may not fail for a long time though. Go with SeaGate NAS disks or WD RED disks.

5TB drives are on the way. They have started to appear in externals and it's only a matter of time before they are available as internal hard drives. However don't expect them to be cheap on launch. You would likely find 3TB or 4TB drives much more affordable.
Message 2 of 10
StephenB
Guru

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

Also, NAS disks have longer warranties that consumer drives. Both WDC and Seagate have 12 month warranties on their "normal" drives, and 3 year warranties on their NAS drives.
Message 3 of 10
anarchoi
Aspirant

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

Thanks for the answer guys

5TB drives are on the way. They have started to appear in externals and it's only a matter of time before they are available as internal hard drives. However don't expect them to be cheap on launch. You would likely find 3TB or 4TB drives much more affordable.

How much are those 5TB external HD ?

4tb Reds are at around 180$ right now, i don't expect 5TB to be more than 250$ish ... I'd buy one at this price but i don't know if it's worth the wait

Also, any idea why customers reviews are very bad against the Red drives compared to the Green ones ? Everywhere i checked the reds had a lot more complaints than the greens 😕
Message 4 of 10
vandermerwe
Master

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

Seagate have announced an April release for 6tb drives and wd have one available already (just not for us consumers).

Even if 5 or 6 tb drives are released soon, it will be months before you get a true idea of their reliability and see the little problems you don't want to discover after you've bought them.
Classic example is with the wd 4tb red drives, despite an excellent reputation of the 3tb version, early adopters of the 4tb red were annoyed to discover that the drives had the load cycle count issue.

Unless you can wait until end of this year I'd get some 4 tb NAS drives, seagate' NAS drive is good for me ( I returned the wd reds)
Message 5 of 10
StephenB
Guru

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

anarchoi wrote:
... i don't expect 5TB to be more than 250$ish ...
We will see. Announcements I've seen are for enterprise-class products, with price points in the $400-$500 range. For instance http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/20 ... rives.aspx
Message 6 of 10
anarchoi
Aspirant

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

seagate' NAS drive is good for me ( I returned the wd reds)

Seagate NAS 4tb is only 1 year warranty versus 3 years for the WD Red 😞

Also, some researches show that Seagate is the less reliable HD brand 😕
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1750 ... ard-drives

I've had so much Seagates fail on me... Just yesterday i discovered one of my old seagate HD had over 1400 bad sectors !!! A new high score..
Message 7 of 10
fastfwd
Virtuoso

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

anarchoi wrote:
Seagate NAS 4tb is only 1 year warranty versus 3 years for the WD Red 😞

Untrue. The Seagate drives have a 3-year warranty: http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/nas-fam/nas-hdd/en-us/docs/nas-hdd-data-sheet-ds1...
Message 8 of 10
anarchoi
Aspirant

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

fastfwd wrote:
anarchoi wrote:
Seagate NAS 4tb is only 1 year warranty versus 3 years for the WD Red 😞

Untrue. The Seagate drives have a 3-year warranty: http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/nas-fam/nas-hdd/en-us/docs/nas-hdd-data-sheet-ds1...


Weird... Newegg says 1 year http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6822178393
Message 9 of 10
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: Should i buy WD Red for my NAS or normal drives ?

I find retailers often advertise 1 year warranties for products such as this without bothering to check whether the warranty is longer. I would go with what the manufacturer says the warranty is.

When you bought your Pro 4 you may have bought it from a reseller which said it had a 1 year warranty, when in fact the Pro 4 has a 5 year warranty.
Message 10 of 10
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