Are the WD Red 3TB drives that much better than green?

[garycase]

Spend the few extra $$ for Reds.  They're more reliable; have a longer warranty; and aren't significantly more expensive /TB.    And definitely upgrade to v5 before you start -- and the FIRST thing you want to do after the upgrade is replace your parity drive with a 4TB drive (or possibly even 5TB, as these are beginning to become available).

 

Then you can start upgrading your drives -- starting, of course, with the smallest ones.

 

[spinbot]

I'm pretty much in agreement with Gary.  I didn't realize 5TB drives exist, however I suspect being the newer size it comes at a premium.  Thanks

[garycase]

I didn't realize 5TB drives exist, however I suspect being the newer size it comes at a premium.  Thanks

 

You can even get 6TB drives now 

(and yes, both 5TB and 6TB drives are a bit pricey at the moment -- but I'd expect that to change over the course of the next year)

 

[spinbot]

Just my luck, the WD Green 4TB went on sale tonight, so its $169.99 (Canadian) , which makes the gap between it and the 4TB Red greater, as the cheapest it sells for (that I've found) is $199.70.  So, at minimum I can look at it as a $30 premium gets me an extra 1 year on the warranty (ie. Red over Green).

 

Knock on wood, I've only had one drive failure and one nearly dead in my 20+ years dealing with computers.  The first one, will come as no surprise with the nickname "Deathstar" and the most recent is a WD Green, but this one I deserve as I tried to justify issues I had with it by blaming my SATA cable and Motherboard.  It only works for 5-10 minutes after powering up the computer from a cold boot.  This drive never made it to my server, I just used it as a torrent drive , so nothing important / irreplaceable.

 

I'm trying convince myself to buy the Green, but deep down, I know I am going to get the RED

[mrow]

Buy a 4TB brand new to replace parity, and buy a 3TB factory refurbished WD Green on eBay for around $80-$90 USD. Replace your parity with the 4TB, replace your 1TB with the refurb 3TB and replace the 750GB with the old parity disk. That gets you 3.25TB of additional space for not a lot of cash and gives you some breathing room to start saving for your new server.

 

Then sell the 1TB and 750GB on eBay to recoup some of the costs. People will still pay for those used disks.

[spinbot]

Buy a 4TB brand new to replace parity, and buy a 3TB factory refurbished WD Green on eBay for around $80-$90 USD. Replace your parity with the 4TB, replace your 1TB with the refurb 3TB and replace the 750GB with the old parity disk. That gets you 3.25TB of additional space for not a lot of cash and gives you some breathing room to start saving for your new server.

 

Then sell the 1TB and 750GB on eBay to recoup some of the costs. People will still pay for those used disks.

 

Personally, I have reservations buying refurbished drives.  I can sometimes convince myself that a refurbished item is potentially better than a new item, as whatever flaw the device had, has been solved, however when it comes to HDD, the less messing around with it, the less shipping back and forth, the better I feel about it.  I suspect that a large portion of failed drives are the fault of poor packaging and/or poor handing.  The savings for refurbs isn't enough to sway me.    That being said, at least having UnRaid the risk of data loss isn't the concern anymore, its just the inconvenience of having to replace a failed drive in the array.

 

I've got a plan of action now:

1.  Upgrade to UnRaid to ver 5 so it will support larger drives

2.  Order a WD 4TB Red as my new parity drive

3.  Remove 750GB drive from server and Re-use old 2TB parity drive

4.  Remove 1TB drive from server and use my back-up 2TB drive (I've kept handy in case any drive failed)

5.  Install 1TB and 750GB drives in main PC

6.  Transfer data off 3TB drive in main PC to 1TB and 750GB drives

7.  Remove 1.5TB drive from server and install 3TB drive

8.  Install 1.5TB drive in main PC

 

The result will be:

Server storage increased by 3.75TB  (removed 750GB, 1TB and 1.5TB and replaced with 2TB, 2TB and 3TB)

Main PC storage increased by 250GB (removed 3TB drive and replaced with 750GB, 1TB and 1.5TB)

 

The only expense is the purchase of the new 4TB WD Red drive.  Although, I am without a back-up drive, so I either need to continue without (knowing I can get a new drive with next day shipping, should the need arise), or I need to purchase a back-up again, but this time it will need to be a 4TB drive (WD Green maybe even, but likely WD Red, in case the parity died).

 

EDIT:  Was able to get the 4TB RED for $184.99 (Canadian) with free shipping through Dell.ca , going through Airmileshop.ca and using a $15 off coupon found on there.    That brought its price down to within $15 of the Green and actually less, as the site selling the Green for $169.99 I would have had to pay shipping on top.

[meep]

Somewhat related question;

 

I have a WD MyBook 4GB Drive.

 

I was planning on removing the drive and installing in in unraid as parity (replacing my current 1TB WD Green.

 

I know this is not going to give me extra capacity right now but I'm starting the long road to upgrading capacity.

 

Now, would I be better acquiring a WD Red 4TB (or Seagate NAS) and using that as parity, popping the MyBook drive in as a data drive?

 

My thinking is that the parity gets hit EVERY write so would benefit from being a more reliable drive?

 

Peter

 

[garycase]

... would I be better acquiring a WD Red 4TB (or Seagate NAS) and using that as parity, popping the MyBook drive in as a data drive?

 

That's what I'd do if I was going to use the MyBook drive.  (I actually only use NAS drives for all positions)

 

[BobPhoenix]

I think it really depends on how you use your array.  Since I write TB's of data in one big session about 2-4 times a year and just READ the rest of the time for 4 of my unRAID servers your idea of using the myBook would work fine since the parity is not used on a read.  On those arrays it is the least important drive since it remains asleep most of the year.  But on my backup server where I'm writing multiple time a DAY I wouldn't want to do that.  I would get the same drive as the rest of them in the array.  In my case it is a 4TB Red in my N54L box.

[mobias1313]

Since I originally posted this question I have only been purchasing the WD 3TB Red's. I would like to replace all of my 2TB Greens with them, but at this point since I have plenty of open bays I have just been adding new 3TB's into the array rather than replacing drives. I have had a few of the Red's fail. Only one actually failed while in use. The others were DOA. The last failure was almost a year ago now, so I am pretty satisfied.

[garycase]

It IS unfortunate how high WD's DOA rate seems to be with these drive.  They are VERY reliable as long as they don't have infant mortality issues -- but it seems nearly 10% or so are either DOA or fail within a few days.    The lesson is to TEST them very thoroughly when you first get them -- get past that, and they're superb drives.    Note, by the way, that this same issue is true for the WD Greens ... and they aren't as reliable long term.    I think WD must just depend on their users to be their QC.

 

[BobPhoenix]

So far for me (knock on wood) the only DOA WD Red's I've gotten can be attributed to lousy packaging by the retailer and not the drive manufacturer.  Every drive that I've RMA'd was from shipments that weren't packaged correctly and the drives could float in the box and ram into each other.  Several actually had DENTS in the top metal plate of the drive and the anti-static bag had a hole gouged into it.  Others just had popped bubbles on the drive sleeves.  All this in an exterior box that was in remarkably good shape.  Slight crushing occurred but nothing I haven't seen before and NOTHING like in garycase's photo he posted in another thread.  So I'm willing to blame the retailer and not the manufacturer.

[garycase]

So I'm willing to blame the retailer and not the manufacturer.

 

Actually, the same is likely true for me.  It IS true that EVERY WD Red I've had to RMA as purchased from the same retailer (Newegg, as I'm sure you know) ... and NONE of the WD Reds I've purchased from others has had any issues.

 

[kalabaddon]

I have used 3 green 500gb drives for different applications a while back,  none of them has failed yet.  I Grabbed one to put in my unraid setup ( just started using it to see how it is,  like it so far and will be getting a license soon so I can actully use the drives I have for it) as a cache drive (for plugins more then caching)  and started to pre-clear it and looked at the mymain page in unmenu and WOW... I am amazed it is still working.  I might need to replace it,  I think this one was in an esxi test box I built a while back but...

 

Start stop count=81

Power cycle count=79

Power on hours=18822

Load cycle count=1178341

 

Ummm  seems kinda high on the load cycle count to me.  but heck its still running.

 

Anyways will update once the pre-clear is done and let you know how it fared

 

Unfortunately I have no idea on the Red drives in comparison,  I run 6 Samsung 2tb's, and 3 Seagate 1.5tb's and 1-1year old Seagate 3tb  drives in my current non unraid server (windows server 2008 upgraded to 2012) and bought 4x3tb toshiba drives for my unraid setup of which I am testing with 3 of them but it looks like I will be buying a full copy soon so I can add the last drive, migrate the Seagate 3tb out of my server 2012 build, and that cache drive.

[jason4207]

Iirc the Green drives were the go-to drives up to 1TB.  My 1TB Greens never gave me any issues.  The 2TB Greens are when they went down hill.  Then Samsung and Hitachi jumped in the top spot.