Just a piece of info that maybe most of you know already. I know lots of people are buying up the green drives.

 

Western Digital Limited Warranty for series BLUE / GREEN = 3 years.

Western Digital Limited Warranty for series BLACK            = 5 years.

 

Even though they cost a little more I'll take that extra 24 months.

Just a piece of info that maybe most of you know already. I know lots of people are buying up the green drives.

 

Western Digital Limited Warranty for series BLUE / GREEN = 3 years.

Western Digital Limited Warranty for series BLACK            = 5 years.

 

Even though they cost a little more I'll take that extra 24 months.

 

Rewind three years - June, 2008.  750G drives ruled, but 1T drives were available.  (750G cost ~80, 1T drives ~170.)

Rewind four years - June 2007.  500G drives ruled, but 750G were available.  (500G cost ~80.  750G cost ~190,)

Rewind five years - June 2006.  300G drives ruled, but 500G were available. (300G cost ~60, 400G cost ~130, 500G cost ~170)

 

How much would should you have been willing to pay, 3 years ago, to get an extra 2 year warranty on a 750G drive?

If a 300G or even 500G disk failed tomorrow, would you really want another one in your array?

 

Today a black 2T drive costs $139.  A 2T Hitachi costs $69.  You decide what to buy.

 

Today a black 2T drive costs $139.  A 2T Hitachi costs $69.  You decide what to buy.

 

Every couple weeks Newegg drops that Hitachi to $59 and as soon as they do I'm going to pounce.

I don't see a 4TB hard drive becoming affordable or mainstream for quite some time. I will guess 2TB and 3TB drives will be the most popular with the next several years. Given that information, I'll stick with spending a little more money on a drive with a better warranty. That will save me money in the long run and keep me alive without buying any new hard drives for possible the next 5+ years. Like we all know, a drive can go bad at anytime.

 

 

Personally I wouldn't pay more when you could spend that very money you would save and buy another larger drive later.

Not to mention the additional heat and power issues you'll get from a Black (7200rpm) drive.

I don't see a 4TB hard drive becoming affordable or mainstream for quite some time.

 

... and who could ever need more than 640kB memory?

 

History has taught us that, however unlikely it seems today, capacities/speeds will increase year on year.  Also, technology always becomes less expensive.

 

Like we all know, a drive can go bad at anytime.

 

Yes, but even the least expensive drives are covered for three years - beyond that they will become obsolescent.

I don't see a 4TB hard drive becoming affordable or mainstream for quite some time.

 

... and who could ever need more than 640kB memory?

 

History has taught us that, however unlikely it seems today, capacities/speeds will increase year on year.  Also, technology always becomes less expensive.

 

That's not really what he said though. Yes, it'll become cheaper, but will it take "quite some time"? I would agree with opentoe and say it'll be a while before it happens. "A while" defined as "it makes sense not to postpone HD purchases".

I don't see any benefits to using black drives. The speed benefit is not significant. 5400RPM drives can serve 4-5 concurrent video streams. Even with concurrent writes to the system to benefit is marginal. 3T drives cost less less and if you include the total cost of a SATA port they are more cost effective on a TB/$ basis than 2T drives. Based on the historical trend in 3 years we'll be buying 6-8T drives.

History has taught us that, however unlikely it seems today, capacities/speeds will increase year on year.  Also, technology always becomes less expensive.

 

That's not really what he said though. Yes, it'll become cheaper, but will it take "quite some time"? I would agree with opentoe and say it'll be a while before it happens. "A while" defined as "it makes sense not to postpone HD purchases".

 

We weren't discussing postponing the purchase, we were discussing paying a premium to secure a 5 year warranty against a shorter, 3 year warranty, on lower cost drives.  If you don't believe that drives will become larger, faster and cheaper within three years, then feel free to come back a say 'told you so!'.

 

In around 1985 I payed GBP500 for a 5MB drive!  In three years time, I would expect to be able to buy a 5TB drive for not much more than GBP50.

No one has a perfect crystal ball.

 

I do believe that some of the consolidation that has happened in the hard disk industry will generally slow down pace of capacity increases, and result in a slowing of the rapid price decreases on drives.

 

We'll just see how much.

 

IMHO, for media storage applications, the WD Black is way overpriced.  And can't agree that the price difference can be justified by the extra 2 years of warranty. 

 

If I was running a heavily utilized database application, I might feel that the extra engineering / QA on the Black drives would be worth the premium to reduce risk of failure.  But then I would be comparing it with other 7200 RPM drives, not green drives, and the price delta would be smaller.