WD Blue or RE3?

Zenoxx

Zenoxx

Zenoxx

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Joined
2 Jan 2003
Posts
208
Hi all,

Just building a new workstation at work and not sure which HD to go for, hoping someone can advise :D

Its between the Western Digital RE3 250GB SATA-II 16MB Cache and Western Digital Caviar Blue 250GB SATA-II 16MB Cache.

Its just gonna be a single HDD workstation, want the drive to have maximum reliability. So when looking at the RE3 it has 5 years warranty etc.
The price difference doesnt worry me. Just wondering if the RE3 will be any good if its not in Raid?

Cheers
 
The cheaper one. 'Enterprise' models are no more reliable than standard ones. Drives just fail.

Neither are fast drives though.

Huh, I just looked at how much both cost. Don't be silly, get a 500GB Samsung F3.
 
Zenoxx said:
Its just for a desktop environment in the office. Reliability is the main factor.
Are Samsung as reliable as WD?
Click to expand...

Any disk is reliable as another to be honest. I've had many more failures with WD than Samsung but it just happens. Might as well get the quicker disk if you're going to be the one using it.
 
You should read this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

Basically, Western Digital RE drives raises an error if it encounters a bad sector, whereas non-RE drives spend some time remapping the bad sector to a spare sector (so appearing to the OS as if there are no bad sectors, although you can check the number of remapped sectors via SMART).

In practice you shouldn't be getting bad sectors unless the disk is old, faulty, or you are throwing your disk around whilst in use...

The wikipedia article indicates that you can't change the TLER setting for newer WD disks, although there are reports on forums indicating that you still can if you google hard enough (I've never tried so can't comment on the veracity of either opinion).

Matthew
 
I am in the same place atm, i am on WD drives and have tried both new old, RE. The RE disks do make a difference and the older WD drives with the TLR enabled does make a difference. I still get random lockups and freezes so now looking at another brand, seagate have terrible firmware issues and seagate are very slow to respond so i am a little stuck over what to do.

It only occurs in fakeraid and i had to sell my hardware raid card because my gfx card is one big monster
 
Samsung is indeed the best HDD on the market in the terms of pure speed and Raw Performance.

but its all about preference tbh. I prefer Western Digital due to my past experiences with them (they were always quick to support a HDD failure etc).
 
My sammy F1 500gb is a great drive, then again I have 2 WD RE3's (320gb versions) in RAID 0 as my boot drives & they too have been brilliant.

For a single drive I would go for a Samsung F3, for RAID I would go for the RE3's, horses for courses I guess.
 
is it true that the samsung HDD have the least amount of moving parts (ergo are, design wise, superior to WD in the terms of reliability?)
 
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