DigiTM 60 Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 A couple of my WD Green 2TB drives have failed with bad sectors Luckily it's has just occurred so I am able to transfer my media. I have way too many 2TB drives in my server (10x), and contemplating going a couple of 6TB thus eliminating 6x drives. Looking at the WD Red and wondering if anyone has used these, and if these would be suitable for a MediaBrowser (ahem Emby I mean) server?My problem is I've noticed my Green drives start failing after 25,000 hours on average, so hoping for a drive that would last a lot longer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrFlibbles 21 Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 WD Reds are my preferred drive for storage. I have them in my server attached to a raid card and have just bought some 4TBs for my new NAS. If you are doing any sort of raid levels on your drives, the reds are a solid choice in my opinion. If you have the cash then going for WD RE drives gets you more enterprise level MTBF, but for my money the reds are the right bang for buck. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DigiTM 60 Posted March 19, 2015 Author Share Posted March 19, 2015 Wish I had the cash for RE drives Unfortunately even the Reds are super expensive. Nearly $400 for 6TB RED, and eventually to replace all my Greens I would need to buy 8x 6TB RED's (that's a whopping $3200 just for hard drives). I am in Australia which is one of the most expensive countries in the world in regards to IT equipment. Which is the big reason I thought I'd ask and research before delving in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrWatson 62 Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 (edited) WD Reds are my preferred drive for storage. I have them in my server attached to a raid card and have just bought some 4TBs for my new NAS. If you are doing any sort of raid levels on your drives, the reds are a solid choice in my opinion. If you have the cash then going for WD RE drives gets you more enterprise level MTBF, but for my money the reds are the right bang for buck. +1 Reds are great i have 10X4tb in my nas the 4 tb are the sweet spot at the moment price wise. If you are using greens in a nas they will die and early death - explained here there is also a solution. But I would just go with the reds they are a great drive. DigiTm couldn't agree more but msy.com.au has the 4 tb for about $227 Edited March 19, 2015 by DrWatson Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DigiTM 60 Posted March 19, 2015 Author Share Posted March 19, 2015 +1 Reds are great i have 10X4tb in my nas the 4 tb are the sweet spot at the moment price wise. If you are using greens in a nas they will die and early death - explained here there is also a solution. But I would just go with the reds they are a great drive. DigiTm couldn't agree more but msy.com.au has the 4 tb for about $227 That's a good price. Might go with the 6TB, since I'll be paying $79 extra per TB which isn't that bad. $160 for an extra 2TB. Figuring the larger the drive the less I will need = better cooling. Arrghhh...so many decisions. All my movies are Bluray Remux, and TV shows are 1080p Bluray remuxes so space is required. Thanks for the article, I'm surprised my greens have lasted me this long really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBers 6766 Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Have you tried getting your failing discs replaced under warranty? WD have a very good RMA service and you can check your disc online. Just a thought. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdrianW 1052 Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I just filled my new NAS with 8 x 6TB Reds in the new year - all good so far. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hamstercat 63 Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 The last drives I bought were WD Red and they're working fine. I used to buy their Green drives because they were cheap but general consensus is that they're cheaply made as well. I've had 3 that either failed or started showing bad sectors in 4 years of on and off usage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Green drives are nice consumer drives for backup and general storage but they are also designed to sleep after 2 minutes of inactivity. I have one in a computer I use for a family web server and it is a few years old now. For general purpose they last well and do their jobs. I haven't had a problem with them in this capacity. As NAS drives, they are prone to failures due to frequent sleep/wake cycles. The Red Drives are a step up with a higher MTBF. They also are designed for more frequent use. Definitely worth the cost of admission, though in the US that is only a low premium over the Green Drives. They are currently about $40 per terabyte here for the 3 and 4 terabyte models. The 6 Terabyte model is a little more at $45 per terabyte. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DigiTM 60 Posted March 19, 2015 Author Share Posted March 19, 2015 Have you tried getting your failing discs replaced under warranty? WD have a very good RMA service and you can check your disc online. Just a thought. Did check and they are from 2011. I have decided to just stick with 4TB RED, since they do seem better value than the 6TB models. Things are a total ripoff in Australia at the moment, have to pickup a new Intel i7 4790k CPU and the cheapest is $466 at MSY, that's $70 more than I paid last year Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aspdend 174 Posted March 20, 2015 Share Posted March 20, 2015 When I built my UnRAID srever, I used a variety of the old HDD's I had knocking around - but I also bought a couple of WD RED's (parity drive and one other) - since then, I've bought a couple more WD Red's to replace some fo the weaker older HDD's that were throwing up errors. Great drive imho - will be swapping all drives over to WD Red's in the long run. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gthrift 57 Posted March 20, 2015 Share Posted March 20, 2015 I recently switched my server at home over from 4 Seagate 1.5TB drives to 2 WD Red 5TB drives. The 1.5s had some bad sectors and this gave the advantage of less heat and less power. We're also beginning to switch over to 4TB WD Red drives in our NASs at work from 3TB Seagate drives that are sitting at a 30% failure rate with warranties running out in July. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jluce50 118 Posted March 22, 2015 Share Posted March 22, 2015 I thought I read that the only difference between Green and Red is the head parking that others mentioned (which is possible to disable). If that's true, you could save some coin by sticking with Green and disabling that "feature". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gthrift 57 Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 I thought I read that the only difference between Green and Red is the head parking that others mentioned (which is possible to disable). If that's true, you could save some coin by sticking with Green and disabling that "feature". The other main difference, and the most important one to me, is the 3 year warranty for red drives vs 2 years for green. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WarrenH 16 Posted March 25, 2015 Share Posted March 25, 2015 I've been running 5x Red (3TB's) for the past 2 years now without any issue whatsoever. Disc checking shows the drives as working 100% notwithstanding they run 24/7. Highly recommend them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Jones 13 Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 I currently have 4 WD Red drives of various sizes in my home server (using drivepool rather than RAID) and they've been running great. The only issue i've ever had was actually down to a bad SATA cable. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Overseer 66 Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 I currently have 4 WD Red drives of various sizes in my home server (using drivepool rather than RAID) and they've been running great. The only issue i've ever had was actually down to a bad SATA cable. WHS2011 with Drivepool FTW. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spaceboy 2493 Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 maybe i've been lucky and maybe my priorities are different but i have a different outlook. i've had 20+ wd green drives over the last 8 years and only one failure, even that i was able to get all the data off before it completely gave up the ghost. i currently have 8 4tb green drives of various brand in my synology and they are all reporting fine. some must be coming up on 2 years old. because i have redundancy in the nas and a full backup in my storage unit i'm not bothered if a single drive fails, they are so cheap these days i'd just buy another replace it and off you go, not sure if i could even be bothered with the hassle of rma. the chances of 2 disks failing at the same time when i am monitoring them regularly is virtually nil and even if they did, i have a full backup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bert 49 Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 What's everyone's opinion on Toshiba? This one seems priced right, but I can get a WD Red right now for $99 at Best Buy too.....it's not 7200 RPM though: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149396&Tpk=N82E16822149396&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=361116&SID=ebs2d-1d9344d1428539395096sbe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 Faster drives can break easier. This also looks like a consumer drive where there is usually only one primary drive. However it has a 3 year warranty so if you want the speed, go for it. It has a four egg review so I would buy it but probably from another retailer. Newegg has problems shipping drives intact in my experience. I have had several arrive damaged and I am only 100 miles away from their shipping facility. If I was a little closer, I would drive in and pick them up but it is currently a 3 hour drive each way to get to their location. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdrianW 1052 Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 Newegg has problems shipping drives intact in my experience. I have had several arrive damaged and I am only 100 miles away from their shipping facility. I bought a couple of Red drives from Newegg and had them shipped to Australia, they arrived in perfect condition. They'd used the best packaging I've ever seen for drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bert 49 Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 Yeah that's never been an issue for me with anything from Newegg, sorry to hear about your experience.... I was thinking it could be useful as my recorded TV drive as well as for processing handbrake although I am not sure the drive speed is my true bottleneck for transcoding or handbrake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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