Are WD Black drives worth the price premium?

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ScretHate

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Are WD Black drives worth the price premium? Anyone have any experience or anything to add about the warranty on these drives? If you don't think it's worth the cost, what 2TB drive would you recommend in its stead?

Thanks
 
Totally worth it; you won't be disappointed. I've had nothing but solid performance and reliability from my Blacks, and I use a 1 TB as my program drive. Can't comment about any RMA experience with WD since it's never come up, but the 5 year warranty is hard to beat. My oldest (original models) have 2.9 and 3.6 years of power on time and CrystalDiskInfo just gave them clean bills of health across the board.
 
I have 3 drives from WD currently, and probably 20+ over a decade or so, I have only had 2 die on me in that time. The Blacks tend to be better for constant use when you are copying from that drive to another and back and so forth, solid performers, though there are drives that are better at certain things such as productivity, OS bound and so forth, they tend to be very good at everything and due to the way their controller is optimized don't lose the speed they have as much as other drives no matter how you use them,

I have 2 caviar black 640(5 and 4.5 years old) and 1 blue EALX model(2.5 years if I recall) The blue is slightly faster then the blacks which are shortstroked and partitioned if used benchmark wise, but I can definitely tell the blacks vs the blue when copying stuff to either drive for backup purposes, installing things. 5 year warranty is very nice though if it comes up you have to send the drive to them of course.

So is it worth it, for warranty yes, for constant specific performance I think so, but if looking at specific uses then other drive might be worth it. Junk drive, Caviar blue as example is probably the better pick, NAS use, Red the different drive do tend to have their controllers optimized in different ways. Hitachi drives are also quite nice last while as WD took them over and they both seem to be benefiting from it. They have different sizes which do tend to have varying levels of performance say 320gb all the way to I believe now 6tb. the 1-1.8-2-4tb models tend to have the best performance all around.
 
With 120gb of main space, you'll be running many programs, games or files off your backup disk. In this instance, yes, I'd say the black drives with the highest areal density is your best bet.
 
The price premium over seagate drives are really not worth it for a strict storage drive because they are not the largest capacity you can get. I've owned both seagate and wd in most cases your drive with die in 10 years making the 5 year warranty moot.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005T3GRLY/ref=twister_B00B99JU4S?ie=UTF8&psc=1


Expandability is something you should keep in mind but if you just want one drive for storage grab a 6TB drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007603 600490667&IsNodeId=1&name=6TB and compare the price to amazon.com

The big reason being are the wd black drives are not able to be used in raid and be stable(this is by WD's design even though the hardware can handle the firmware is programed not to) where as the seagate above drives can be.Those seagate drives are cheap enough to be paired with one of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816856039

You might be thinking I don't want to invest in something like that but you will need more space down the road so entertain the idea for a moment.If you were to stick 4 drives into that external drive bay has hardware raid and Jbod support you would have a lot space that with last you a while and that you could transfer between systems without need of a raid card. You can buy a esata to sata cable and not even need a esata controller http://www.ebay.com/itm/221153029388?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

I'm just trying to make you aware of other options.

AS a side note seagate tends to spend their money on R&D more than than WD which likes to waste extra cash on dividends http://www.techpowerup.com/194483/western-digital-board-declares-dividend-for-december-quarter.html

You could google search it yourself but I personally perfer seagate these days to shady WD.
 
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WD warranty service was exceptional with a Raptor drive I had a 10 years ago and a Black drive I had a couple years back. Best RMA experiences I have ever had with any company.

If I can get that level of service 4.5 years into a 5 year warranty...I'm going to stop eating cheeseburgers for a week to afford the price premium over a regular WD drive.

I can't comment on other hard drive companies since I rarely use them due to my wonderful experiences with WD so far.
 
Seagate drives do look appealing due to their solid price point; however, I've heard that their warranty begins when they leave the factory, so theoretically I could end up with a drive that only has a year long warranty period. And from reading newegg reviews, there are quite a few DOAs and early failures.
 
there is above average Seagate drive deaths in 1-3 years vs competing drives, if I recall Seagate is only 1 year warranty and generally also lowest cost compared to others, I wonder why that is.

You are advising raid why exactly? performance increase but also better chance of something happening, just partition and shortstroke which is just as easy to might take a bit longer only relies on 1 drive to speed it up vs many drives which is many possible fail points. If RAID is a choice, why Seagate when Hitachi drives, caviar blue, caviar red, RE etc will work just as well and also have a better then average life expectancy compared to other drives out there and also if you choose careful enough, you get drives that are much better all around instead of just burst speed and random seek.

I myself use my caviar black 640 for secondary drive and blue EALX as my junk/backup with my Agility 3 as primary and it is very very rare I wait that long for anything that I do to take that long to load. backups could be a bit faster but it is still fast enough (full 640 to the blue takes ~1.2 hours used space 492gb)

Going by sheer numbers alone, not individual statistics, over a decade or so, Hitachi had lowest average failure for all capacities, WD second least, Samsung third least, Maxtor and Seagate most by a pretty large margin.

So, save a couple of $ but take the chance that a drive happens to be bum or fine, or pay a bit more for on average lower level of bad drive within first 3 years of owning, hmm, seems like a thing like a budget psu to save a few $ or a good quality one that costs a few $ more doesn't it.

Either way it is all in what it is used for, not what benchmark points mean. Drives with high density and low number of platter to make up that density tend to be the fastest all around. The caviar blue 1tb EALX as example is a dual platter design, the black 640 are dual platter (they chose to not use last portion of one disk) EZEX is a single platter 1tb. Density is #1, then seek time(disk access speed) burst can count if for example it has a decent size cache or like the caviar black dual processor so it can store more info to use that burst rate etc. There is many sides of the story to look at not just 1.
 
Trusting a drive to not fail is a recipe for disaster. Plan for it to fail instead.
 
I was just thinking that for the price of one 2TB Black drive I could almost get 3x Blue 1TB drives and set them up in RAID5. I'd get the same amount of space, double read speed and fault tolerance. Good idea?
 
Are WD Black drives worth the price premium?
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Just like the Toshiba 2TB you recently purchased there is a chance that your WDC 2TB black drive will arrive DOA.

WD warranty service was exceptional with a Raptor drive I had a 10 years ago and a Black drive I had a couple years back. Best RMA experiences I have ever had with any company.
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Having done 75+ RMAs I say that WDC and Seagate have a similar return experience. Both will upgrade you if they do not have a refurbished drive of the same type as you send them in stock. Also if you are close to the end of the warranty period the drive you get back from the RMA will have at least a 90 day warranty.
 
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The price hike of the black may or may not be worth it, that really depends on what you are storing on the drive. Over the years, however, I've found that WD drives are worth the premium over Seagate. Of the 10 or so Seagate drives I've owned over the past few years, I've got only one that didn't fail. By the same token, I believe I own 5 different WD drives, some of which are getting on in years, and I've never had a single problem. (Also have a toshiba and even an old hitachi still rolling along).

I won't ever buy another Seagate drive. Just not worth the hassle.
 
ScretHate said:
I was just thinking that for the price of one 2TB Black drive I could almost get 3x Blue 1TB drives and set them up in RAID5. I'd get the same amount of space, double read speed and fault tolerance. Good idea?
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Probably not.

I'd rather just buy two standard 2TB and put them in simple RAID1. Not as fancy but less hassle down the road.
 
daglesj said:
I'd rather just buy two standard 2TB and put them in simple RAID1. Not as fancy but less hassle down the road.
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I prefer to use the second or third disk as a backup drive that is only connected when I need to backup and avoid raid1 completely since raid does not remove the need for a backup.
 
All I'm saying is that in this age of very large HDDs some folks are needlessly setting themselves up with over complex redundancy that totally outstrips what's actually required.

Often simpler works best even if it doesn't have the same bragging rights.
 
I ran two 1TB WD black drives in a server for 6 years constant use, they never gave a hiccup. I don't think I've ever had a black drive fail. I've also been very happy with the reds. The greens and blues have crapped out on me on more than one occasion and have always been out of warranty when they did. :mad:

Downside is the blacks are a bit noisy due to their aggressive performance tuning.
 
I've started using Western Digital's enterprise drives over their higher end consumer drives.

I use an SSD for my OS and applications where speed is wanted. For mass storage, my primary concern is reliability. The WD SE for example is the same price as the WD black and is supposedly more thoroughly tested. The enterprise drives feel much more robust as well (much heavier and more solid than the consumer drives). The 2TB SE drives I'm currently using are also quite a bit quieter than the Black drive I had in my last computer.

I guess I'm saying, unless you're looking for a primary OS / applications drive, given that the price is the same I'd lean toward something like the SE over the black.
 
I have a huge pile of dead 400/500gb RE2's... those drives were absolute garbage

the newer RE3/RE4 drives seem to be holding well
 
ScretHate said:
I looked at the SE drive but I read in customer reviews that its SATA connecter had no locking mechanism and that it's underside screw holes were shallower than usual. Both would pose a problem for my particular setup so I decided to avoid.

Right now I have my eyes on this 3TB Hitachi drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...2145911&cm_re=hgst_3tb-_-22-145-911-_-Product
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I currently have a pair of the HGST NAS drives running in raid 1, now with over 1K hours on them and rock solid.

I have a total of 4 black drives with between 25-36K hours on them and still rock solid.

The 3TB NAS is currently going for $125 which is a steal for that size even if it only has a 3 year warranty.

I'll probably grab another pair soon.
 
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