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repurposing Reds for gaming drive??

W

wdeydwondrer

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2014
Messages
488
So I've been upgrading the server lately and have a few 3tb reds sitting here that are still in good shape. I was wondering about putting them in my main rig as the game storage drive, but doing 2 of them in raid 0. Currently have a few 1 tb 7200 Blues in there now and could use the additional space. Not concerned with possible data loss of raid 0 since it's strictly games and I can redownload them whenever. Wondering about performance, if I wouldn't notice the difference from 1 7200 > 2 5400 then I'd call it a win. Thoughts?
 
I currently used a Red 3tb as a bulk storage drive in my gaming box for recordings and some game storage. Works fine, just slow compared to an SSD. As far as reliability, I operate as if it will fail at any point, and do not keep anything worth backing up on it. If it goes, I'll pop in another Red 3tb from my stack of "retired NAS" drives. RAID 0 Sounds like a great idea, might give it a try.
 
I highly recommend using a spinning drive for main storage and accelerating it with an SSD through Primocache. Best of both worlds.
 
I have a nvme for boot and a ssd for main storage, files and important stuff are kept on my server on a dedicated raid 1. These reds would just be for my stream library and other games I install and only play for 2 hours lol.
 
RAID 0 will help with raw throughput but not access times (which matters more for your game loads.). It's possible the added plater density of the 3tb red makes up for the rpm difference. Your best bet is probably to run a few benchmarks on your drives and see actual performance.

Blues and Reds have been around long enough now that the description isn't super helpful in speculating performance. A new Blue drive probably performs very differently than an 8 year old one.
 
I can do that, what am I benching looking for?

The blues are minimum 4 years old, not in front of them at the moment
 
It's honestly been a long time since I worried about testing speeds on a spinner lol. HDtune was my go to back then. I imagine it should still be adequate to determine your access time and transfer rates.

lower access time = better load times. (assuming your transfer rates aren't awful.)
 
Booted up the rig. The Blues are WD10EZEX-00WN4A0 and the Reds are WD30EFRX-68EUZN0. Both appear to be 2012 drives. The Reds are manf 2017 if that matters, not sure on the blues as they are buried behind cable management and water tubing.
 
I've attached a clip of the Blues and the Reds.
 

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It appears the Reds have better access times and slower throughput. I would think they would be marginally better for game loads even without RAID. If you did run them in raid 0 that should makeup for the throughput difference.
 
So I dumped my reds in today. Storage spaces refuses to work saying the drives are disconnected as soon as I hit the create button so I made a stripped dynamic volume in disk management. Sadly hdtune can't see this volume, just the original disks so don't know how to test it. Question though, is this stripped array able to be migrated if I purchase a new motherboard (different brand)? I know the storage spaces raid 1 transfers with no problem but never done a raid 0 inside windows.
 
For whatever price a new motherboard would cost, I'd just grab one of those $110ish 3.5gpbs 1tb nvme drives and not bother with the reds.
 
Already have a stack of Reds on hand so essentially it's free. Depending on how this works out I may pick up a 2/4 tb nvme, I'll just have to get a board with dual nvme next (current board second m.2 is sata speed). Just wanting to know if a win10 stripped array is transferable.
 
Just FYI, seagate 2TB 7200rpm drives are going for around $55 these days if all you're looking for is cheap storage for games/programs.
 
I've run a red as a gaming/general purpose data drive. It isn't noticeably slower than my 4+ year old 1TB WD Blue Spinning drive.

Recent 2018 and newer drives seem to have higher sequential read/write speed though.
 
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