Storage Upgrade - WD Black Or Something Else?

Looking at upgrading my storage. I have always used blacks and have never had any issues but I am not familiar with anything "new" or other brands. I'm looking at 2tb + drives and would like life dependability. Silence and power consumption are not important.

Please provide model numbers with suggestions as I see that even within the 2tb WD Blacks, there are different models

No one wants to bite? .......

Depending on what you are going to use them for the WD Red model line seems pretty popular right now as a newcomer to the NAS market. For a single disk as an upgrade i would certainly look at 1tb platter disks.

If you're not planning on doing any kind of RAID, then black drives are nice, especially with the 5 year warranty. If you leave the computer on 24/7 you might consider some of the slower spinning drives as they provide almost as fast of performance (at least for serving media) while saving a bit of power.

I personally dislike my wd black drive due to its noise. It is by far the loudest thing in my system and it gets on my nerves. I should have just bought a raptor as they are quieter than the drive I have...

EDIT: Woops, I misread the part about you not caring about the noise level. Ignore my post...

Even if power and noise aren't a concern (as the OP mentioned), you are paying a considerable price premium for the black drives ($179 vs $109 at Newegg for WD 2TB black vs green, and the green has free shipping right now). Yes they do have a longer warranty, but that doesn't necessarily mean the drive is more reliable. It could have about the same failure rate, and they just factored the estimated extra warranty claims into the price.

No Raid. Storage only. Been looking at the Greens and the price differential is tempting. Wish everything was black and white!

IMO the WD Green's just piss me off, even as a mass storage drive. Although not every Green drive is equal to each other and the model numbers become a PITA to research and remember. WD Black drives are as solid as you can get from my experience. Prior to the floods they were very solid for the price.


However there is still another choice that some might forget. The WD Blues. They have some 2.5" WD Blue 2TB drives out there for an affordable price and the performance is actually impressive for a 2.5" drive. I'm rocking 3 of them from my previous RAID0 array and they aren't bad, but not great either. They little are right down the middle. Seems like the WD Blues have just kind of faded these days and the noise is negligible.