WD 3TB Red vs SE series drives

iroc409

[H]ard|Gawd
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I am looking at buying some new hard drives, and see the WD Red drives are on shell shocker sale today. I'm looking at picking up 4 for a home file server.

Is it worth the extra money to get the SE series instead? I like the idea of the 5 year warranty, since that's about how long I'm expecting this build to last. The performance upgrade of the SE probably isn't critical, and I believe they use more power. Quiet and low-power are priorities.
 
I have 2 3TB Red drives. They're much more quiet than the Black drives that were replaced. What's the price difference between the Red and SE drives?
 
Red's are on sale I think for $120 from the email, normally $140. The SE's are about $185-200/ea. So about $300 for 4 drives, which is a pretty big difference.
 
I have 6 reds, and 8 se's.

It really depends what you plan on using them for, reds want to sleep, se's where designed for constant 24/7 access.
 
It really depends what you plan on using them for, reds want to sleep, se's where designed for constant 24/7 access.

It's not constant, but I use them a fair amount when I am at home, as I don't keep any storage on my desktop. Once I get something set up in the living room, the wife will probably do a fair amount of music streaming off the server. Certainly nowhere near a datacenter load.
 
Reds are quieter and use less power than the Se series. I ended up buying a couple Blacks the other day.
 
I'm in the same dilemma, but am thinking of 4tb capacity. I know I shouldn't pay any attention to reviews etc, but they haven't been overwhelmingly positive for the reds. Having said that, there have been a few positive comments from people here in the forums. But I don't mind paying a little extra for reliability and the SEs strike me as a bit better in this regard. Obviously all my evidence is anecdotal, but since both are relatively new, not much else to go on. Alternatively, there are these Hitachi deskstar nas drives, but I'm not sure what to make of them. I usually buy wd add my own experience had been good.
 
Red's are on sale I think for $120 from the email, normally $140. The SE's are about $185-200/ea. So about $300 for 4 drives, which is a pretty big difference.

Dang that's $30 less per drive than what I paid. NewEgg has good prices, but WD had to correct them into shipping the drives correctly. NewEgg caused bad drives with bad shipping.
 
REDS are basically a 'raid ready' version of the Green drive.

SE is a low end 'raid ready' enterprise, where the RE is the high end 'raid ready' enterprise drive.
 
We replaced all of our Greens and Reds with 4TB Se drives and have been really happy with the performance and reliability so far. Only downside is that they run hotter, which means noisier fans. All up very much worth it - the 5 year warranty is good peace of mind.
 
So, I was going to build a 4-disk raidz2 with these systems, but cost is always a concern since I'm building a new server at the same time. Would it be worth considering going with two 3TB SE drives now in a mirrored pair, and adding another pair of SE's down the road to the zpool in another mirrored pair?

I'm using about 1.75TB of storage at the moment, and have been archiving a lot of stuff lately, but it would probably take a few months to fill that out.

Part of the reason for raidz2 was better resiliency, but the SE's also have a lower error rate. My current system is a 4-drive mirror, and it has been OK. Mirrors also generally perform a little better, and two SE's would be cheaper now compared to 4 Reds.

Or, a pair of 4TB SE's would be about the same as 4 3TB Reds.
 
Dang that's $30 less per drive than what I paid. NewEgg has good prices, but WD had to correct them into shipping the drives correctly. NewEgg caused bad drives with bad shipping.

I've been hearing about this in some reviews on Amazon, Newegg, and elsewhere.
 
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