I have unraid setup on an hp gen8 microserver with 4 hard drives and an ssd cache drive.

 

It is mostly useful for storage and streaming a film now and again, I also run W7 on one vm on the ssd

 

The whole system sits idle most of the time

 

Is it worth the extra for a wd red for parity over the green when I plan to use greens as the data disks?

Personally, I don't think so.  I'm happy to use Greens in my UnRAID box, as most days the drives are spun down 23.5 hours.  I'm only using the Reds I'm using because I had them, they're ones I bought when I was running a Synology.

 

I use a Green for my parity, no problems to report.

I think it's really a matter of personal preference. I started with a red as my parity drive but then I bought 2 larger greens because the price was too good to pass up. I am also using a Black from my cache drive. All of them have never given me a problem or have any concerning SMART Values. At this point, I will get any WD drive if I can find a good deal on it.

I even like Blues, they work just great.  Shame they top out at 1TB.  I have a heap of 500GB Blues in various machines, and they just work.  Heck, machines at work have 500GB Blues running 24/7 since early 2008...

I always use Reds and I can't even remember why.  Did the Greens have some issue with firmware at some point? That may have been the reason....

Greens park their heads quickly, which pushes the Load Count up.  It's easy to turn off the Idle Timer with wdidle though.

Greens park their heads quickly, which pushes the Load Count up.  It's easy to turn off the Idle Timer with wdidle though.

Yep, that sounds familiar.  Didn't know about wdidle.  Does make me wonder how much difference there is in all these drive models.  There's even a purple one now for CCTV use I think.

Also I would use the Red drives (and do) because they have a longer warranty.

The Reds use slightly less power ... i.e. comparing a 3TB Red to a 3TB EZRX Green, read/write power is 4.1w for the Red, 6w for the Green;  Idle is 2.7w for the Red, 5.5w for the Green;  and standby/sleep is 0.4w for the Red, 0.8w for the Green.  [same's true for other sizes -- I just used the 3TB for this example since this is currently the "sweet spot" in terms of best $/TB cost, which I gather is what you're focusing on.]

 

Not a big deal -- if you had 6 drives that were spun down 85% of the time, the total difference in power consumption in a year would only be ~ 21KW ... or around $3 worth of energy.

 

But the Reds do run a tad cooler than Greens;  have an extra year's warranty;  and don't require modifying any firmware parameters (e.g. WDIDLE) to work perfectly.    My view is that the modest price difference is worth it, and they're all I buy for my servers.    But I don't disagree that the EZRX series are very nice drives, and if you're buying enough of them you can fund a spare drive with the cost savings.

 

As for the question, "Is it worth getting wd red for parity drive?"  ==>  No, not if your array is otherwise using Greens.  One thing you may want to consider is using a 7200rpm drive for parity (either WD Black or an HGST NAS unit), which will give you better performance if you're doing multiple writes at the same time.

 

 

 

But the Reds do run a tad cooler than Greens;  have an extra year's warranty;  and don't require modifying any firmware parameters (e.g. WDIDLE) to work perfectly.    My view is that the modest price difference is worth it, and they're all I buy for my servers.

 

Well if they're good enough for you I suppose I can make do with them.. 

 

As for the question, "Is it worth getting wd red for parity drive?"  ==>  No, not if your array is otherwise using Greens.  One thing you may want to consider is using a 7200rpm drive for parity (either WD Black or an HGST NAS unit), which will give you better performance if you're doing multiple writes at the same time.

 

That's something I think i knew in the deepest darkest corner of my memory but I might consider that next time I upgrade a parity drive.

 

Thanks for all the replies 

 

I thought the whole point of the greens were they used less power and generated less heat?

 

Anyway in the end I've decided to go for the red as the 2TB RED with extended warranty is only £8 more then the green of the same size, its not in stock atm but i'm not in a hurry.

 

I read in the reviews a few people having trouble registering for the extended warranty

Thanks for all the replies 

 

I thought the whole point of the greens were they used less power and generated less heat?

 

Anyway in the end I've decided to go for the red as the 2TB RED with extended warranty is only £8 more then the green of the same size, its not in stock atm but i'm not in a hurry.

 

I read in the reviews a few people having trouble registering for the extended warranty

 

There's nothing to "register" for => the 3-year warranty is automatic.    [Actually, I don't know for certain if the WD warranties are the same in all countries, so if you're not in the US things may be a bit different.]

 

Thanks for all the replies 

 

I thought the whole point of the greens were they used less power and generated less heat?

 

Anyway in the end I've decided to go for the red as the 2TB RED with extended warranty is only £8 more then the green of the same size, its not in stock atm but i'm not in a hurry.

 

I read in the reviews a few people having trouble registering for the extended warranty

 

There's nothing to "register" for => the 3-year warranty is automatic.    [Actually, I don't know for certain if the WD warranties are the same in all countries, so if you're not in the US things may be a bit different.]

 

 

I'm in the UK and some on the reviews said on registering the drive with Western Digital, it said it was "Out of Region"