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Western Digital Red
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Western Digital Red

MrDOSMrDOS Member
edited July 2012 in General

Have you guys seen the new Western Digital Red drives? They look fantastic. I'm thinking of picking up 3x3TB and building a new NAS.

http://pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Western-Digital-Red-3TB-SATA-SOHO-NAS-Drive-Full-Review/

Thanked by 1Derek

Comments

  • DamianDamian Member

    Hmm, interesting. So are these RAID-ready consumer drives, or are they replacing the RE series?

  • miTgiBmiTgiB Member

    I saw then on special in this mornings newegg flyer, but I am so turned off by WD I'd probably avoid them, not too hip on WD philosophy of disabling features of ATA-8 S.M.A.R.T. meaning if you ever get a raid card, these drives are totally useless, and WD designed them to act that way.

    Do yourself a favor and pick up some 3tb Hitachi drives, it may cost a little more, but they will actually work

    Thanked by 3Infinity Damian Derek
  • DamianDamian Member

    Additionally, reading the benchmarks in that thing that @MrDOS posted, they don't do very well on random i/o... so they wouldn't be good for our processes.

  • MrDOSMrDOS Member
    edited July 2012

    @miTgiB said: meaning if you ever get a raid card, these drives are totally useless, and WD designed them to act that way.

    Really? All the reviews seem to be stating that they're designed for RAID – I don't know of too many other drives in the price range that have TLER.

    @miTgiB said: it may cost a little more

    I can't see any for less than $360. That's half of what I want to put into the whole build!

    @Damian said: so they wouldn't be good for our processes.

    Yeah, the throughput seems moderately attractive but they bite on actual server use stuff. Definitely NAS oriented. Not sure if I can even expect them to perform reasonably in a somewhat-active seedbox. The 3-year warranty is a very nice step up from the 1-year warranty on ST3000DM001 drives, though, which seems to be the only other option in my price range.

  • miTgiBmiTgiB Member

    @MrDOS said: I can't see any for less than $360. That's half of what I want to put into the whole build!

    I just see WD pulling too many sketchy things, so I avoid them. I have a 4 drive hitachi 3tb 7200rpm machine with hardware raid5 for the backup vps I sell and the latest incarnation is fantastic. The only other way I like to make large fast arrays is adding a SAS expander and smaller but many more drives, the raid card, bbu, expander get pricey pretty quick though for home use. $300 raid card, $150 BBU and $250 expander. But that setup will work for upto 16 drives, I have it chained at home with 32 2tb drives for my nas.

  • MrDOSMrDOS Member

    @miTgiB said: I have it chained at home with 32 2tb drives for my nas.

    Holy crap, how are you allocating that? I have no familiarity with arrays that large, beyond hearing armchair admins saying pessimistic things like “you shouldn't do that”. RAID60?

  • miTgiBmiTgiB Member

    @MrDOS said: RAID60?

    In a sly way yes. I have a 3ware 9690-4i card going to a SAS Expander, which also chains to another cabinet and it's SAS Expander, each holding 16 drives. In the raid card I built 4 8 drive raid6 arrays then use mdadm in raid0 to join all 4 and format the end device xfs.

    I built this NAS a couple of years ago for storing my media collection, but I added a lot more storage than I felt I could use for the semi-long term since it was several grand even with $99 2tb drives, so I have 42tb of usable space, but 20tb of data is already in use. I never expected to use half the space this quick, so in a couple more years I get to rethink this and build another, maybe try to break the 100tb barrier.

  • rds100rds100 Member

    @miTgiB which SAS expanders are you using? I couldn't find anything reasonable.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited July 2012

    @MrDOS said: I have it chained at home with 32 2tb drives for my nas.

    And I thought my 3 tb of data are a lot for home user... Still 3 tb to go and I filled the last 2 tb in 2 years so far, but now I bought a mpeg 4 camera so it will be less space used since I never find the time to convert from mpeg 2.
    M

  • At home, I have a pair of USB Seagate GoFLEX 3TB drives in SW RAID1 :) Works fine for me!

  • lumaluma Member

    @miTgiB Thanks for derailing the thread.

    I was interested in seeing how these new Red drives will work with Raid. They are supposed to be made for it.

    Just because you don't like WD does not mean you can just derail a thread and then start showing off about how rich you are and have all this crap at home.

    Some folks do just want a couple reliable drives in a raid.

    Thanked by 1qenox
  • miTgiBmiTgiB Member
    edited July 2012

    @luma said: Thanks for derailing the thread.

    Maybe you missed the parts where I justified my dislike, and they do sketchy things, but you're welcome.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    @luma said: They are supposed to be made for it.

    I do not see the need for high performance raid at home. I think capacity and redundancy should be the main selling points of such a setup.
    I am talking about a typical home where we dont have graphic stations working remotely or ha schemes, ppl just need their multimedia collection to be available and somewhat secure to stream to their devices.
    For this, if we have a perma-on situation, then green silent drives should do, if we power it up only 2 hours a day when we need it and also need a bit of performance (bluray streaming or similar or moving files around quite often), then those red would probably be a better choice.
    M

  • pcanpcan Member

    This new WD drive has a wider operating temperature range than RE4 and Seagate Constellation; MTBF and warranty are better than the WD green series. They maybe fixed the reliability issue I experienced on green and blue WD SATA drives. If price and availability will be right, I see a good use as single drive, maybe in a standard (poorly cooled) USB external enclosoure. Performance seems to be the same as WD green; on my experience, they are too slow to be used in RAID effectively. The WD web site basically says "this drive does not pop out of the RAID, promised!". I tried to build a hardware Raid with WD green drives, but it was unrealiable because drives continually popped out of the array. I ended up replacing them with Hitachi 2 Tb drives. This is not the perfect solution because they cost (a little) more and need more cooling. This Red WD drive could be a useful alternative, but only if the price is similar to WD green series.

  • pcanpcan Member

    @maonique said: I do not see the need for high performance raid at home.

    You need a RAID array that rebuilds in a couple of hours. On my experience, a Raid 6 made with 4 WD 2Tb green drives takes about 3 days to rebuild, and while rebuild is running, the performance is terrible (forget streaming video). Random access time is simply too low. Raid10 could be a better choice for this drive.

  • MrDOSMrDOS Member

    @Maounique said: then green silent drives should do

    Except, you should (supposedly) never run WD Greens in a RAID because they have some crazy error correction duration that causes RAID controllers to freak out and kick them out of the array if anything goes slightly amiss.

  • edited July 2012

    @Damian said: So are these RAID-ready consumer drives, or are they replacing the RE series?

    They will not be replacing the enterprise drives at all; they will be placed between the standard consumer drives and the enterprise drives.

    1TB Green $90, 1TB Blue $100, 1TB Red $110, 1TB Black $120, 1TB RE4 $130 (NewEgg)

    I could see using them in a home/office NAS or file server.

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