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WD Black vs RE4 Drives - 1TB

F

FreakinAye

n00b
Joined
Mar 14, 2006
Messages
23
Building a OI+Nappit ZFS system, and trying to decide on 1TB drives. Controller is M1015.

I'm looking at 10x 1TB drives for Raid10.

The WD Black WD1002FAEX is ~$136
The WD RE4 WD1003FBYX is $145

I've read that for ZFS, you should actually disable TLER so I won't see benefit there, but is there any other reason to get the RE4 over the WD Black or vice versa?

Both are 64MB cache
WD Black is Sata6 vs Sata3 on the RE4, but that's irrelevant as well

Is performance similar?
Reliability should obviously be much better with the RE4 since they are enterprise class.

I suppose I should also include the WD Black WD1502FAEX 1.5TB drives for ~$160 as an option.

Primary purpose of the storage will be NFS based datastores for ESXi 5
 
>> Reliability should obviously be much better with the RE4 since they are enterprise class. <<

I wonder about that.
I have never seen any sort of statistical illustration that this is true.
I have never seen a manufacturer written explanation about what exactly is different except firmware.
Do "Enterprise Class" drives have;
- better bearings
- different swing arm assemblies
- different pickup heads
- different platters
- even different circuit boards

I think of the longer warranty as simply "insurance" - the higher price is the insurance premium.
 
Well they have a higher rated mean time between failure, so they should be more reliable. I don't know *what* exactly they do to improve the MTBF, but it's one of the more useful specs wrt reliability.

5 year warranty certainly doesn't hurt though
 
tombew said:
>> Reliability should obviously be much better with the RE4 since they are enterprise class. <<

I wonder about that.
I have never seen any sort of statistical illustration that this is true.
I have never seen a manufacturer written explanation about what exactly is different except firmware.
Do "Enterprise Class" drives have;
- better bearings
- different swing arm assemblies
- different pickup heads
- different platters
- even different circuit boards

I think of the longer warranty as simply "insurance" - the higher price is the insurance premium.
Click to expand...

Actually, there is no such thing as 'enterprise-class', I think you mean enterprise-grade.
Yes, the drive is considered a nearline-class drive which is middle of the road enterprise-grade, on par with Seagate's Constellation drives, at least in the SATA interface category.

Enterprise-grade drives are designed for 24/7 usage as well as having additional features such as RAFF and a heavier chassis which supports higher vibrations without the loss of data transfer rates in a many-user environment.
Desktop-class drives do not have these features and are not meant for 24/7 usage, but for 8/5 usage in a single-user environment.

Of course desktop-class drives can do this, but the chances of them failing are increased, especially if they are loaded into a server case with many other HDDs creating high amounts of vibration, they just weren't designed for that kind of use, not to mention heat.

Honestly, in the end, it depends on what one needs the drive for.
If I were the OP, I would spend the extra money for the RE4 drive, not for TLER since he won't need it for his setup, but for the added uptime reliability.

Also, WD Black drives have had a much higher failure rate as of late, I would avoid them at all cost if the data is mission-critical, but that's just me.
 
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