what's the highest quality Western Digital hard drive?

There are also SATA versions of the WD RE4, which in hardware are very close to the WD Black.
 
AV? Are you talking about the Purple line? Those are not "high quality", at least not in the normal scope you would associate with a Raptor or Black.
 
Okay, for reference:

Blue: Standard desktop drives
Green: Low power drives (variable speed)
Red: For NAS storage (variable speed)
Red Pro: For NAS storage (spec'ed like an enterprise drive)
Purple: For A/V security systems.
Black: High performance
Velociraptor: High speed drive
RE4: Enterprise drive

That's pretty much most of the hard drives you'll deal with from WDC.
 
I have had mixed results with black, but better than blue, and better than green.

The Re disks, I don't think I have ever had one fail, out of a few hundred, maybe 1 years ago.
Also have good Xe disks, but not as many of them.
 
The WD RE drives are more than just a different class they offer different features, and have less errors.

They are a superior drive. If you have the $ that's what to get. I run them in my old NAS.
 
Enterprise and blacks are the same except for hardware raid

No, you're wrong. Sorry.

They're not the same.

They may have similar performance, but they are not the "same".

(For HW raid as you mentioned, jut 1 of the things)
Black = NO TLER
RE = TLER

Blacks have less load/unload cycles.

Blacks are more prone to errors too:

Black: <1 in 10^14
RE: <10 in 10^16 or <1 in 10^15 depending on model.

All of this leads to the RE being far superior... IF you need that, but the < error could be benefited by all.

A black is like a RE that didn't make the cut, the guts may (not sure) be the same but the drives are NOT identical in terms of features.
 
RE: <10 in 10^16 or <1 in 10^15 depending on model.

<10 in 10^16 is the same as <1 in 10^15. Although I find <10 in 10^16 to be deceptive however since Seagate does this as well I guess it is the norm.
 
Velociraptor.

High RPM = Higher Random IOPS

5 year warranty, and similar <10 in 10^16 error rates to RE drives.

Only thing RE drives have are larger capacities but slower spin rates.
 
The RE+ is a joke, it's 5760 rpm

according to WD, their WD RE MTBF is 1.2M, but the VelociRaptor is 1.4M
 
Okay, for reference:

Blue: Standard desktop drives
Green: Low power drives (variable speed)
Red: For NAS storage (variable speed)
Red Pro: For NAS storage (spec'ed like an enterprise drive)
Purple: For A/V security systems.
Black: High performance
Velociraptor: High speed drive
RE4: Enterprise drive

That's pretty much most of the hard drives you'll deal with from WDC.

WDC doesn't sell variable speed drives, IntelliPower drives have a unspecified but fixed speed between 5400rpm and 7200rpm

Also the error rates of various WDC drives are

Purple - < 1 in 10^13
Black, Blue, Red, Red Pro and Se - < 1 in 10^14
WD Re - < 1 in 10^15
 
If you compare the drives.

RED have a different balancer than greens, and blue, probably referse to bearings.

The RE have totally different motor and bearings and probably most other parts, completely different grade than blacks.

It's those details that change the reliability, it's not just firmware changes between the disks.
 
But I am on my 3rd dead WD Black now. The 1st one gradually fail just prior to the 5th yr. warranty, so I see that as acceptable.

They said a replacement, it won't even format

Then they send another WD Black, back in Oct., just yesterday, it dies. PC can't read the NTFS, and all these are 5 yr. warranty drive.

Total complete disappointment, I wasted 6 hr. to finally fig. out it's the drive that disallow win 7 to boot up
 
If you had three drives die in the same spot there is a high chance that the reason is something else.
 
I haven't bought an enterprise HDD in a long while. The main thing I remember about them compared to the domestic versions was they were much noisier. Probably not the case today?
 
IT's different PC. The 1st one last 4.7 yr. on a HP. That 1 was sent back for warranty replacement. The replacement that arrives won't even format. Then they sent another one, that is just die 2 days ago. It last 6 mth.
 
I think I've owned over 2 dozen Black drives, 1 failed after 7 or 8 years.
The others are still going in one form or another. Only reason I ever changed them was capacity and cost.

Office machines I build all have blue drives and I've never had to replace one.
Most of my customers go about 5-7 years between upgrades.

I use enterprise drives for servers.:D
 
I have had great luck with HDDs, had everything from WD to Seagate to Hitachi and Toshiba, all have out lasted their use (so far). I have thrown out some Seagates and Hitachis because they were just old and the capacity compared to new drives just made no sense to keep (could buy a drive double or triple the size for $30). I still have a WD black and Seagate running (both storage drives) and a 600GB VR, which I got when it first came out, it is no longer my OS drive and is my main steam folder, runs very solid, rest of the drives are SSD, one for the OS and one for normal programs and 2-3 most used games.

Prices on SSDs have been falling so other than the storage drives, by the end of the year my whole system will probably be SSD, the storage drives might even get moved over to a NAS or something for backups.

As for the VR line, I always thought they were their enterprise drives just with a sata interface, they were often the same size (2.5") and rpm as their SAS counterparts, however on the inside they could be completely different for all I know.
 
my whole sys. except that wd black, is already all SSD. Now because of time wasted of this incident and almost data lost, I have switch over the last drive to a 600GB SSD
 
wd re

probably in theory

we use a lot of consumer and enterprise hdds as sometimes up to 10 tb of transactional logs generated every day

i'd say they all die more or less the same and enterprises are not dramatically better

Is it the VelociRaptor? Or the WD AV or the WD Black?
 
Office machines I build all have blue drives and I've never had to replace one.
Most of my customers go about 5-7 years between upgrades.
Why do they go about 5-7 years between upgrades? You could very likely skip one or even two whole cycles if you upgrade those to SSDs.
 
For platter drives I'd go Black every time. I had a pair of Velociraptors blow up on me around the 5-year mark close together, and it wasn't pretty (mechanical failure). I would definitely go Enterprise if I did heavier I/O on a regular basis.
 
Got 4 Velociraptors of which one failed after 5 years of use. Finaly retired them after 6 years. Good drives and warranty though (got a new Velociraptor through Dell the next day).
Might do a Raid 0 setup with the 4 of them for fun.
 
I am not such a fan of the Blue drives. I have had a couple of them warp the platters really bad to the point of vibrating really bad and wearing down the plastic where the heads park when turned off.

When that happens, it basically kills the heads and the drive ceases to function.

And yes, I disassembled the drives to see exactly what went wrong.
 
One is being sold by Newegg itself. The other is being sold by a seller on Newegg who probably has auto-price increase setup if a stock of a item gets too low.
 
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