I just bought a pro license and am upgrading my system to include an ssd cache drive and some added storage. My current system has three, 3TB WD Red drives in it right now. 1 Parity and 2 storage drives. I would like to purchase two, 4TB drives, one to upgrade the parity drive and one to add into service along side the current 3TB parity drive. I use my system as a plex media server as well as backup for the computers in my household and will soon be running OwnCloud. Would it behoove me to start using WD Pro Red drives, regular Red, or some other drive? While cost is of some concern, I am more concerned with my data.

 

Thank you

Another brand to look at could be HGST and their Deskstar NAS drives. Haven’t used them myself but they have, from what I have read, very low failure rate. Price is a about the same as the Red. Would be interesting to hear from someone that has some hands on experience with these.

The regular Red drives have been fine for me.  Unless you think you need the 7200rpm of the pro drives for the faster parity checks I wouldn't bother.  For me an even better drive than the Red's has been the Hitachi/HGST drives.  I've had a much better DOA rate with them.  Got some 2TB Hitachi (not a NAS drive) that have > 30,000 hours on them that I'm just now retiring to off line backup status.  I haven't owned my Red drives long enough for that yet although I believe my 2TB Red drives have > 20,000 on them I will have to check tonight to confirm.  My newest HGST drives (6TB NAS drives) are very good (really fast parity check time ~ 200MB/s on outside tracks - 6x6TB drive array - 5 data 1 parity) but they have less than 10,000 hours for sure and probably around 1-2,000 hours on the oldest drive.  So can't comment on there longevity yet but don't expect any problems based on past Hitachi/HGST experience.  I also have a number of 4TB cool spin Hitachi/HGST drives on a different server and some drives are over 20,000 hours as well.

My current parity drive is the 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS.  I had issues with write speed at first while it was connected to my Areca controller but after I moved it to a motherboard connector it flies.

Thanks for the input. How do I check my current drive hours? I am on 6b14

Thanks for the input. How do I check my current drive hours? I am on 6b14

Click on a disk in the Main tab, and from the result select the Health tab.  Now clicking on disk attributes shows the SMART data, and power on hours is one of the values listed.

Awesome, approximately 10k hours on the drives, 0 errors on WD Red 3Tb drives. One more question, is there an unmenu/management extension/docker for unraid 6, or are all the features built into to Main page that I just got the hour usage from?

The WD Reds, Red Pros, and HGST NAS units are all excellent drives.

 

The latest BackBlaze report is the first time they've included the 4TB WD Reds ... and although they only have on pod worth of these drives (45), they've had ZERO failures with them -- which is also what I've seen with the couple dozen I've bought.

 

The only reason to use the Red Pros is the faster speed ... but personally I prefer the slower rpms of the Reds, since that translates to slightly lower power and, more importantly, lower operating temperatures.

 

You won't go wrong with any of them -- but if it was me I'd buy the WD Reds.

 

Thanks guys, decided to stick with 4TB reds.