Is it worth spending the extra for WD Red?

GeX

GeX

GeX

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Hi all.

I'm overhauling my NAS. I use an HP NL36 Microserver running Ubuntu. It runs 24/7 and holds all my media (which is streamed to the HTPC, radios, laptops etc). It also holds backups of my MacBook and my girlfriends laptop. It currently has a pair of 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1s in there with a little ~60GB 2.5" as the boot disk. No array. Just separate disks. It's around 80% full. The disks are old, certainly older than 5 years.

I want to replace my storage with a pair of 3TB drives, and have them run in RAID1. WD Reds look to be (on average) £30 more expensive than other 3TB drives. Like the Seagate ST3000DM001.

It's going to mean that rather than spending ~£180, I'm going to have to spend ~£240. Is it worth it for the WD Red?
 
What sort of speeds are you getting across your network from the NAS? I suspect the difference in speed of the drives is going to be bottlenecked anyway at the network, especially if you move from single disks to an array.

If you had them locally attached and were using it for loading apps/games etc. that would be different.
 
I've not benchmarked it since I first set it up over 2 years ago. I can check later when I'm home although speed isn't really an issue. The NAS lives in the cupboard under the stairs and is linked to the HTPC in the lounge via GbE, my MacBook (which backs up often using TimeMachine) is connected by WiF around 65% of the time but via GbE in the office if I need to shift any large amounts of data.

It's more longevity (and sound/vibration) I'm concerned with. However, my experience so far with 'normal' drives has been OK. That risk will be reduced with mirroring though.
 
Done a bit more reading today about various drives. It looks like the Reds are designed for RAID/NAS use, and more suited to 24/7 power on etc. A lot of 'consumer' drives look to be designed for upto 8hrs a day usage and have their quoted speed / performance tolerance fluctuating between drives in the same model range.
 
I've got two Reds (3TB). They're slightly quieter and run slighly cooler than the 1TB Greens they replaced. The Greens ran 247 for about year without a hitch though. They're good drives also.
 
I have a pair of 3TB Red's in mirrored mode i am really pleased with them. Very quiet and in my opinion perform very nicely too.
 
It basically boils down to how much you value your data and backups. Is it worth the extra to you?
 
Clav said:
It basically boils down to how much you value your data and backups. Is it worth the extra to you?
Click to expand...

It doesn't boil down to that at all. They'd be running mirrored, and the chance of the second driving failing before I can rebuild the array is low - unless something catastrophic happened to the NL36.. which is an event likely to take out a pair of WD Reds too.

The warranty is attractive, but then like I say - my current 'consumer' disks are pretty old and still going strong. (touch wood, lol).
 
They're not really worth it. Enterprise drives have never been shown to last any longer than consumer disks, and it's the same here. If you're going to spend more than put it toward 4TB disks.
 
£60 over the 5+ years you will likely have those drives, is £1 a month (50p per drive). Either way it isn't going to change your life, so why not go for the purpose-designed Reds with the longer warranty? I have a couple of them, and they are dead-quiet, super low heat (if I shut down my NL36 and immediately pull one of the drives, it is no more than luke-warm), fast, and so far reliable. What's not to like?
 
Personally, I've had many consumer-grade drives in both simple, software RAID, and hardware RAID, and a couple of RE drives on arrays too, and given how often I've had to lean on the warranty for replacements for both types of drive, I'd always go for a drive with longer warranty. I've just bought several Reds because of just that, and automatically excluded other drives with shorter warranties before even starting. A 1 year warranty on a drive is utterly, utterly pointless. But three is worth paying for. As an example, my old RE2 500s needed three replacements within their 5 year warranties (all bought at the same time). The replacements alone made it worth the extra cost of the warranty. If even one of my Reds need replacement within their three years it will have been worth it, and if not, then at least I have three years peace of mind, rather than knowing I'd saved £20 to have what feels like a bit of kit the manufacturer has no confidence in beyond what the legal minimum says they have to give.
 
The basic point here (as explained above) is - the manufacturer doesn't trust it beyond 1 year... why should you? For the sake of £20 you get what you pay for.
 
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