Western Digital Red 8TB Video Review

Here is what I'm seeing as a price per TB... NewEgg is used for reference, and I am looking at Western Digital Red drives:

1TB $63 - $63 per TB
2TB $90 - $45 per TB
3TB $110 - $36.60 per TB
4TB $150 - $37.50 per TB
5TB $195 - $39 per TB
6TB $245 - $40.83 per TB
8TB $380 - $47.50 per TB

Please note that NewEgg regularly runs 2fer specials which can drop the price of TB. The reason why I'm keeping a eye on this is because I want to build a FreeNAS box later on this year.
 
Good thing about them releasing an 8TB drive, is that the 6TB drive cost per GB drops since it's no longer the largest drive :)

I've started using 6TB drives in some of my servers now that the price per GB has come down, although I'm mostly buying 2TB & 4TB as they are big enough and the cost/GB is better.

Don't think I'll be buying any 8TB drives until the costs comes down and I see their reliability.
 
in the future i will need to replace my aging storage drives. i like the price of the 3TB.
 
ZLoth said:
Here is what I'm seeing as a price per TB... NewEgg is used for reference, and I am looking at Western Digital Red drives:

1TB $63 - $63 per TB
2TB $90 - $45 per TB
3TB $110 - $36.60 per TB
4TB $150 - $37.50 per TB
5TB $195 - $39 per TB
6TB $245 - $40.83 per TB
8TB $380 - $47.50 per TB

Please note that NewEgg regularly runs 2fer specials which can drop the price of TB. The reason why I'm keeping a eye on this is because I want to build a FreeNAS box later on this year.
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Have you considered WD Red Pro drives? I invested in 8x WD Red 6TB last year - but if WD Pro equivalents were available (which they are now) I would have probably opted for them. Longer warranty, faster...although certainly more expensive.
 
8GB holly crap I put in some 4TB drives a year or so ago and am getting nervous about size of data per drive. Seems awesome to have more space per drive but at what point do we have to worry about failure rates replacing/filling these drives? hmmm maybe mirroring will be the answer...

Wonder what the risk would be for 4x8GB drives in mirror vs 4x6GB in a typical single drive parity config. (yes I know not same size but close).
 
dandirk said:
8GB holly crap I put in some 4TB drives a year or so ago and am getting nervous about size of data per drive. Seems awesome to have more space per drive but at what point do we have to worry about failure rates replacing/filling these drives? hmmm maybe mirroring will be the answer...

Wonder what the risk would be for 4x8GB drives in mirror vs 4x6GB in a typical single drive parity config. (yes I know not same size but close).
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Like anything else it depends on the application and criticality. For me, I run 8x 6TB in a RAID6. Gives me two drives for parity - in case one fails I have one left during the (long) recovery. I also always have a cold spare 6TB drive on hand so I can rapidly replace drives.

I backup all of my data to another NAS here locally every night. I backup my critical data (around 2TB) real-time to Crashplan.
 
1815+? Think I have the same setup, plus a 4 bay JBOD backup box with a common 6TB red shelf spare. Might buy an expansion box later this year if the 6TB prices drop.
 
These look nice and all, but here is what I don't get.

Why does one 8TB drive cost MORE than two 4TB drives. It should cost LESS than two 4TB drives...

With every other hardware out there, the bigger one you buy, the cheaper per unit it becomes.
 
sk3tch said:
Like anything else it depends on the application and criticality. For me, I run 8x 6TB in a RAID6. Gives me two drives for parity - in case one fails I have one left during the (long) recovery. I also always have a cold spare 6TB drive on hand so I can rapidly replace drives.

I backup all of my data to another NAS here locally every night. I backup my critical data (around 2TB) real-time to Crashplan.
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Yep, redundancy is the way to go.

Since June 2014 I have been running 12x 4TB Reds in dual 6x RAIDz2, so it winds up being a ZFS RAID60 equivalent.

Been very happy with the setup.

For me absolutely EVERYTHING I care about goes on volumes with at least some sort of redundancy these days.

I boot off of single SSD's, but semi-frequently image those to my NAS, and don't keep anything but OS, installed programs and temporary working files on them.

All of my real data is stored to my redundant NAS. I haven't used a hard drive - any hard drive - in a non-resundant mode in almost 7 years.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
These look nice and all, but here is what I don't get.

Why does one 8TB drive cost MORE than two 4TB drives. It should cost LESS than two 4TB drives...

With every other hardware out there, the bigger one you buy, the cheaper per unit it becomes.
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Density, tooling costs, mass production etc makes it that way. The smaller drives have been around for a while so they have sold enough to pay off the tooling/infrastructure costs allowing lower of pricing, not to mention normal market forces of "older tech". Plus new and shiny!
 
WetMacula said:
1815+? Think I have the same setup, plus a 4 bay JBOD backup box with a common 6TB red shelf spare. Might buy an expansion box later this year if the 6TB prices drop.
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1815+, yup. :) Btrfs now, too...very happy with it.
 
dandirk said:
8GB holly crap I put in some 4TB drives a year or so ago and am getting nervous about size of data per drive. Seems awesome to have more space per drive but at what point do we have to worry about failure rates replacing/filling these drives? hmmm maybe mirroring will be the answer...
Click to expand...

I say that for data you absolutely do not want to lose multiple backups are the answer regardless of the size of the drive. For data like htpc recordings I find this is unnecessary so some redundancy (provided by dual parity using SnapRAID) is a cheaper and better solution for me.
 
How are they addressing the issue of the drives physically leaking the helium? Helium is notorious for being hard to store long-term. Sure, it's not under any pressure inside the drive, but hundreds or thousands of spin-up/spin-down cycles can't be good for it.
 
With the cost of Enterprise SSD dropping and capacity surpassing mechanical, I guess they are still trying to make money on old tech.
 
Mohonri said:
How are they addressing the issue of the drives physically leaking the helium? Helium is notorious for being hard to store long-term. Sure, it's not under any pressure inside the drive, but hundreds or thousands of spin-up/spin-down cycles can't be good for it.
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Plug-ins?
 
CRaschNet said:
With the cost of Enterprise SSD dropping and capacity surpassing mechanical, I guess they are still trying to make money on old tech.
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I say it will be a long time (possibly decades) before an 8TB SSD hits $380 if it ever happens.
 
drescherjm said:
I say it will be a long time (possibly decades) before an 8TB SSD hits $380 if it ever happens.
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I'm more optimistic and give it about a decade. At present, the largest SSD with a SATA interface is 2TB with a price range of $500 to $880 per NewEgg. And, the largest SSD available is a Fixstars 13TB SSD for $19,000. (YEOWCH!)
 
Still horribly priced. I'm still holding out as long as I can before I need to get more space, but it is getting hard.
 
Neobits still has the Toshiba X300 6 TB drives for $170 which is less than $29/TB. I just ordered a bunch.
 
I just got a Seagate 8TB from Amazon for $218 (list price $299)

Serving me fine currently. Just for capturing gameplay recording is all.
 
Mohonri said:
How are they addressing the issue of the drives physically leaking the helium? Helium is notorious for being hard to store long-term. Sure, it's not under any pressure inside the drive, but hundreds or thousands of spin-up/spin-down cycles can't be good for it.
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I imagine it has more to do with the steel casing the HDD's are made from. It's a helluva lot thicker than your average mylar balloon. Since the Helium isn't under too much pressure, it's not likely being forced out and looking for leaks, I suspect it will take longer than than the mechanical lifespan of the drive to leak out all the helium. Since oxygen and nitrogen can't really leak in (their molecules are bigger than helium), you're left with almost a vacuum which wouldn't necessarily too bad.
 
I've have a pair of DELL PER730 with 8x8TB enterprise drives in RAID6 since about October last year....... I can barely saturate a 1Gb connection and so wasted money on the dual 10Gbps NICs. Maybe they don't respond as well to RAID. How are they getting these results?
 
Did you get the He8 drives or the Seagate SMR drives? Are you talking about GB sized transfers?
 
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Yeah, for a bump to my JBOD home server, I got two 3TB drives. the price was right.
 
Geez, do people ever go back and view their plots after they forget what the plots mean?
Plots are horrible, every heard of grouping? And please don't use the fancy Excel plot styles, with shading, glow and other shit.
Ughhh, plots are unreadable.
 
Very interesting. I still don't need to upgrade my 4TB SAS drives yet but maybe in a year or 2.
 
EvilWays said:
Not the same drive inside, so not an apples to apples comparison.
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indeed. Didn't someone before post about a way to get them real cheap through like non profit or education programs?

I just recalled the price being like 75% of retail or something
 
Stereodude said:
How do you know that? What other 8TB drive does WD have that they could be stuffing in there?
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interesting point. I am curious. BTW others have said that externals are ussually main line rejects. I don't know if thats true but people here have said externals are drives that typically don't meet spec and are a way to salvage them.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
BTW others have said that externals are ussually main line rejects. I don't know if thats true but people here have said externals are drives that typically don't meet spec and are a way to salvage them.
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While possible, that doesn't make a lot of sense either. The external drives still have a warranty. In what way could they be rejects and still work reliably? Or, are we working from the assumption that external drives have much less stressful usage patterns so a drive that would fail in 6 months in internal use will last 3+ years in an external enclosure?

While, the typical external drive might see a far gentler usage pattern than an internal drive, how would a drive manufacturer "bin" drives? What are they looking at? CPU are easy. You can measure certain parameters, leakage current, power consumption, etc and bin them accordingly. What criteria of a HDD do you use for binning?
 
Stereodude said:
While possible, that doesn't make a lot of sense either. The external drives still have a warranty. In what way could they be rejects and still work reliably? Or, are we working from the assumption that external drives have much less stressful usage patterns so a drive that would fail in 6 months in internal use will last 3+ years in an external enclosure?

While, the typical external drive might see a far gentler usage pattern than an internal drive, how would a drive manufacturer "bin" drives? What are they looking at? CPU are easy. You can measure certain parameters, leakage current, power consumption, etc and bin them accordingly. What criteria of a HDD do you use for binning?
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someone was mentioning it in another thread in the past. I think it had to do mostly with platters and how the drive performed but it was a while ago and i didn't pay close attention to it since it wasn't something important to me. I don't buy externals so.
 
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