WD Red drives?

[snowjim]

Hi,

I there any reason to not choose the Red version for a desktop computer where most of the stored data will be streamed videos?

I have seen alot of posts suggesting that the Red is only for NAS with 2-4 discs but I have not seend why it would not work as good or better then a Green disc in a reagular desktop setup?

 

[omniscence]

There is no reason to get a Green drive over the Reds except price. They are faster, consume less power and they do not have this useless head parking feature.

 

[Aesma]

I use a 3TB red as my main hard drive alongside my main SSD. It has all kinds of files on it, including games, it's just a hard drive.

 

[gunbust3r]

Why is there not a 4TB Red? Is WD afraid of canabalizing the 4TB RE sales?

 

[slth]

I'm looking for some benchmarks of a 4-disk WD Red 3TB RAIDZ array. Anyone who can help out?

 

[1010]

Why is there not a 4TB Red? Is WD afraid of canabalizing the 4TB RE sales?

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1731705

 

[chrcoluk]

There is no reason to get a Green drive over the Reds except price. They are faster, consume less power and they do not have this useless head parking feature.

so the problems reported in this thread early on are not issues anymore and red's will work on in a software raid1 setup not using NAS?

can a red 2tb mirror a 2tb green ok you think?

here greens and reds are the same price. UK pricing rarely follows logic.

 

[scyntre]

Ordered 4 from Newegg - 2 failed of the 4.

Sent back 2 to Newegg - 1 failed of the 2 they sent back.

Finally got all drives up and running on a Cineraid box - another just failed today (I think of the original batch but not sure). Sending all 4 back to Newegg, getting store credit and getting something else. Also tested all drives in a hot swap external sata interface, a few were definite mechanical errors (you could hear the spin up and click). One wasn't recognized at all at one point, I've been around the block with these things so my memory on exactly what happened when is sketch, but they're fooked if you ask me at this time. Don't trust 'em.

Not sure what's going on here as I have blacks, blues, and greens in different machines for years around my house and no issues.

These were 2tb reds and very recently purchased (within the last month).

Yeesh.

 

[Sollord]

Ordered 4 from Newegg - 2 failed of the 4.

Sent back 2 to Newegg - 1 failed of the 2 they sent back.

Finally got all drives up and running on a Cineraid box - another just failed today (I think of the original batch but not sure). Sending all 4 back to Newegg, getting store credit and getting something else. Also tested all drives in a hot swap external sata interface, a few were definite mechanical errors (you could hear the spin up and click). One wasn't recognized at all at one point, I've been around the block with these things so my memory on exactly what happened when is sketch, but they're fooked if you ask me at this time. Don't trust 'em.

Not sure what's going on here as I have blacks, blues, and greens in different machines for years around my house and no issues.

These were 2tb reds and very recently purchased (within the last month).

Yeesh.

I'd personally blame Newegg and there harddrive football then the drives themselves

 

[dalekphalm]

Ordered 4 from Newegg - 2 failed of the 4.

Sent back 2 to Newegg - 1 failed of the 2 they sent back.

Finally got all drives up and running on a Cineraid box - another just failed today (I think of the original batch but not sure). Sending all 4 back to Newegg, getting store credit and getting something else. Also tested all drives in a hot swap external sata interface, a few were definite mechanical errors (you could hear the spin up and click). One wasn't recognized at all at one point, I've been around the block with these things so my memory on exactly what happened when is sketch, but they're fooked if you ask me at this time. Don't trust 'em.

Not sure what's going on here as I have blacks, blues, and greens in different machines for years around my house and no issues.

These were 2tb reds and very recently purchased (within the last month).

Yeesh.

I'd personally blame Newegg and there harddrive football then the drives themselves

I'd second that. Newegg has a HORRIBLE reputation for shipping HDD's in shitty/unsafe packaging. Thus they seem to have a higher than average fail rate. Especially if you're buying drives in lots smaller then 6-10. NCIX and Amazon have much better HDD shipping methods. With Newegg, it seems to be a flip of the coin as to whether the shipper packs them properly or not.

 

[rseiler]

It's too bad scyntre didn't mention how they were packaged.

 

[Neb]

I'd second that. Newegg has a HORRIBLE reputation for shipping HDD's in shitty/unsafe packaging. Thus they seem to have a higher than average fail rate. Especially if you're buying drives in lots smaller then 6-10. NCIX and Amazon have much better HDD shipping methods. With Newegg, it seems to be a flip of the coin as to whether the shipper packs them properly or not.

That's been my experience as well. If you either happen to luck out and they have a full oem box available they'll ship it to you in that if you bought a few drives at once. Other times, you'll get the ridiculous packaging of a bare esd bagged drive in bubble wrap. I got a slightly better version of that recently:

The visible side of those drives were on the top, and more than a few of the bubbles were popped, indicating that they probably had an impact at some point during shipment. I ran them through a very comprehensive burn-in test and they checked out, but I was very wary when I first opened the box.

 

[mls1995]

I'm looking for some benchmarks of a 4-disk WD Red 3TB RAIDZ array. Anyone who can help out?

I have 4 Red 3 TB drives in a FlexRaid array. I've been running them since last summer. All came from NCIX and they are all flawless (probably thanks to NCIX's outstanding packaging).

 

[BecauseScience]

NCIX and Amazon have much better HDD shipping methods. With Newegg, it seems to be a flip of the coin as to whether the shipper packs them properly or not.

I've had a couple bad experiences with Amazon too. Not quite Newegg bad but still not correct packaging. I recommend shops that sell primarily to businesses. Look for places with zero consumer/gaming stuff and lots of high end IT equipment.

I called the place I use now to ask about their disk packaging procedures. I asked if they ALWAYS use the correct boxes with foam/plastic inserts. Their reply was "Of course! We're a Seagate distributor! We know how to ship disks." That's what you want to hear.

I've bought twelve disks from them since and have not had a single DOA or early death. It's refreshing not to deal with the consequences of shitty packaging. You'll pay $10-20 more per disk but it's well worth the time saved.

 

[Neb]

What's the place that you use now?

 

[Mav451]

What's the place that you use now?

I second this question
A reliable web retailer for hard drives would be worth supporting.
(I've had good/bad experiences buying locally from MC, but of course the advantage is I can easily exchange them the same day, as they are a B&M after all)

 

[rsbennett00]

Tiger, cdw, pcconnection, and provantage.

 

[chrcoluk]

Ive had issues with quality control and WD recently. After the fukushima event and the flood, their quality checks suffered. Almost 50% of the drives I bought with the red label have failed or were DOA..

newegg?

 

[efexone]

I'll chime in - Bought 4 from newegg for a synology ds412+. None have failed in the past 4 months and were good capacity for the $$$.

 

[rseiler]

Good experiences twice in a row with Amazon earlier this year. Double boxed, with the inner box the OEM one with the drive suspended.

 

[Putz]

after reading all this i wanted to check which models I had in my QNAP..funny i forgot i upgraded mypair of 1tb WD to 2tb Hitachi 7k3000 2tb models... lol

 

[diehard]

How would an array of 10 3TB of these work on a RaidZ-2 config reliability wise? It would be a backup server and not mission critical.. would the drive failure rates be acceptable considering these are half the price of enterprise drives?

 

[diehard]

dang, was hoping someone had experience with these in an enterprise environment.

 

[ShamisOMally]

Bought two 3TB Red's the beginning of this month from Memory Express

One was DOA, the other died in 5 days

Replaced both with Seagate 3TB Barracuda's, both are running fine and dandy in my computer

I don't think its just me, I've spent the last 15 minutes reading this forum section after googling RED drives, and this is one of the first results that pops up.

Sad news, WTF happened WD? You used to be so good.

Hell I got two Seagate 7200.11's that are over five years old that still work, which have typical drive gremlins (1-2 failed sectors a year, typical for 1.5TB+ drives)

 

[Mav451]

How does MemoryExpress handle packaging? DOA and a death within 5-days puts it squarely on handling by the e-tailer. This is no different than users blaming WD for DOA drives that are shipped by Newegg's terrible packaging methods

I've used nothing but WD since the whiny 80GB days and should any clicking occur within the warranty period, I have always advance-RMAed it for 0 down-time.

And to answer one of my earlier questions, I used BHP for my first 3TD Red Drive. Excellent packaging (double-boxed) and well worth the slight increase in cost over Amazon/Newegg. No sense it saving $5 for a retailer that won't probably package bare drives

 

[jimnms]

I've been meaning to replace a WD 2TB Green which has been running 24/7 in my HTPC for over 3 years. I had a bit of back luck when we had a power outage a couple of weeks ago. The UPS crapped out while the system was shutting down which caused some file system corruption. I recovered the data, but it gave me a bit of a scare as I initially thought the HD failed. Even though I'm not going to use it for NAS/RAID, I was thinking a WD Red would be better suited for this system since it runs 24/7 (and the Red is backed by a 3 year warranty). The system it will go in is also a fan-less mini-ITX case. The current WD Green stays below the max operating temp, and I've read that the Red drives run even cooler.

 

[Krobar]

Running well for 3 months now on a Raid 5 3TB Red array on Adaptec 52245

 

[Liggywuh]

I've been meaning to replace a WD 2TB Green which has been running 24/7 in my HTPC for over 3 years. I had a bit of back luck when we had a power outage a couple of weeks ago. The UPS crapped out while the system was shutting down which caused some file system corruption. I recovered the data, but it gave me a bit of a scare as I initially thought the HD failed. Even though I'm not going to use it for NAS/RAID, I was thinking a WD Red would be better suited for this system since it runs 24/7 (and the Red is backed by a 3 year warranty). The system it will go in is also a fan-less mini-ITX case. The current WD Green stays below the max operating temp, and I've read that the Red drives run even cooler.

I noticed no difference in surface temperature of a 2TB Green and a 3TB Red, they were both barely warm to the touch, around 30*C according to SMART tests.

 

[Krobar]

Temps in my Norco 4224 for various drives below. Positioning in the case likely effects the results though.

WD30EFRX - 29-32C
WD20EADS - 32-35C
HDS5C3020ALA632 - 35-36C

 

[kac77]

dang, was hoping someone had experience with these in an enterprise environment.

BAD STAY AWAY FOR ENTERPRISE ENVIRONMENTS!!!!

We tried them and one died on day one then about a week or two later another died with seemingly problems with a third. We just shut the server down until we could use entirely different disks. 3 out of 12 is WAY too high. For comparison we stood up a storage unit with about 50 drives in it and none of them died, even after stress tests. Now for home use you could probably get away with it, but for enterprise? Not on your life.

 

[Mister9]

According to the official announcement from WD, the WD RED drives are designed for Personal/SOHO NAS which has less than 6 drives.

For enterprise environments, you should consider the new WD SE, RE or even XE series.

 

[Aesma]

Temps in my Norco 4224 for various drives below. Positioning in the case likely effects the results though.

WD30EFRX - 29-32C
WD20EADS - 32-35C
HDS5C3020ALA632 - 35-36C

That WD20EADS is a 4 platters drive while the 3TB red is a 3 platters.

 

[EMdubs]

Are the REDs really worth going with over the Greens for a streaming media server?

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Are the REDs really worth going with over the Greens for a streaming media server?

As I see it there are really only two real benefits with the Red's over the greens.

1.) TLER. This is practically a must if the drives are being used in most hardware RAID, and a "nice to have" even in software RAID solutions where TLER isn't strictly required, as otherwise any error can bring things to a near standstill until it times out.

2.) Longer Warranty.

Considering the price difference isn't huge, I'd just go with the reds for good measure.

 

[Dami]

I bought 10 3tb reds last year but haven't run them 24/7 until last month when i finalized my norco 4224 server. For testing and learning around zfs, they worked fine. One week running though, one drive showed too much read errors so i replaced it. A week later (run scrub the day before without problems), another one fails with the same error. I was in luck that i had 10 more ready for another raid2z which is now on hold, till I get those 2 back.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I bought 10 3tb reds last year but haven't run them 24/7 until last month when i finalized my norco 4224 server. For testing and learning around zfs, they worked fine. One week running though, one drive showed too much read errors so i replaced it. A week later (run scrub the day before without problems), another one fails with the same error. I was in luck that i had 10 more ready for another raid2z which is now on hold, till I get those 2 back.

Where did you buy those from? I'm curious since there has been a lot of talk about faulty drives mostly being caused by poor packaging during final shipping to the end user.

 

[jimnms]

Where did you buy those from? I'm curious since there has been a lot of talk about faulty drives mostly being caused by poor packaging during final shipping to the end user.

This is what has me worried. Most of the negative reviews I see on both Amazon and NewEgg are due to bad packaging. I've noticed a pattern in some of the reviews which reflects my personal experience in purchasing HDs. Whenever I've ordered a big batch of computer parts which includes a HD, the HD is usually removed from it's packaging, wrapped in bubble wrap and tossed in the box with the rest of the parts. Whenever I've ordered just a HD by itself, it comes properly packaged, double boxed and suspended by foam or plastic inserts.

You can see what I'm talking about in the customer photos at Amazon. All the pictures of drives incorrectly packaged are tossed in a box with other items, but the ones properly packaged are just drives by themselves.

 

[Unknown-One]

Purchased two WD Red 2TB drives from Amazon on November 9, 2012.

So far, so good. Torture-tested both when they got here. To-date, SMART reports no problems on either drive.

For reference, they're both mounted using bungee suspension in a Fractal Design R3. Average idle HDD temperature is 32c.

 

[Zuess]

I bought 10 3tb reds last year but haven't run them 24/7 until last month when i finalized my norco 4224 server. For testing and learning around zfs, they worked fine. One week running though, one drive showed too much read errors so i replaced it. A week later (run scrub the day before without problems), another one fails with the same error. I was in luck that i had 10 more ready for another raid2z which is now on hold, till I get those 2 back.

I had 2 drives that went for RMA, These drives were purchased in September last year.
I haven't had any more problems with drives from about December till now.
If your disks were purchased last fall I'm not surprised they had a lot of errors.

 

[Dami]

Where did you buy those from? I'm curious since there has been a lot of talk about faulty drives mostly being caused by poor packaging during final shipping to the end user.

From a distributor here in Slovenia, Europe. Packaging was sufficient for every hdd i bought so far.

I had 2 drives that went for RMA, These drives were purchased in September last year.
I haven't had any more problems with drives from about December till now.
If your disks were purchased last fall I'm not surprised they had a lot of errors.

Yes the first 10 were bought early September. Then 5 in December and 6 again last week. Also bought 5 Toshibas DT01ACA300 which are great so far. Fast and cool.