Looking for a recommendation on a hard drive

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3dsurfer

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Hello,

I am putting together a small home server for PLEX and data backup. The question I have is what in your opinion is a decent hard drive to go with? I have read website reviews about western digital red drives and then seem pretty good but tend to have middle of the road road customer reviews on newegg and amazon. I am looking have 2 drives at least 4 terabytes each. I want to use windows 8's storage spaces to have a backup of my stuff. I have about 2.5 terabytes of movies and the rest is my graphics work back up.
I have also read that 3 terabytes or less the hard drives tend to have a poor performance.
I tend to get great information from this site so I figured I would ask this question here and be done with it so I can make my purchase.
Thank you in advance!
 
There are a few factors in a hard drive that minimize the failure rate.
  1. Spin speed
  2. Platter count
The faster a hard drive spins the more likely it is to fail, so you're going to want a low RPM hard drive. Also, the more platters a hard drive has the more likely it is to fail, so you want a low platter count as well.

I would never recommend anything else other than Western Digital.

Something like the WD Green WD20EZRX has 2x 1TB platters, for a nice sweet spot of high capacity with low spin speed and platter count, at a really sweet price point as well.

Or, if you want something more spendy then opt for the WD Red WD20EFRX which also has 2x 1TB platters. The premium IMO is just the fact that it's advertised as a NAS hard drive. It also has an extra year of factory warranty.

Run them in a mirrored RAID format for extra security.
 
Anecdotal here, all from my experience on consumer grade SATA stuff for personal and some small biz use in NAS and storage servers....
WD RE4 drives if it's within my budget and possible to get the storage/disk ratio in the device.
WD Red drives are great for NAS and RAID. Picked up a bunch for my QNap TS509 about 3 years ago when they were new, haven't tossed a disk yet.
WD Green have the highest failure rate of any drive I've personally had to deal with in this type of environment in recent years. The only time I touch them now is to pull them out of an enclosure and swap in something better.

The larger the disk, the longer it takes the RAID to rebuild should you need to replace it. In a basic RAID1 setup, using 2x4TB disks, if one gets tossed, I'd be on pins and needles with the other drive until the RAID is fully rebuilt.
I run RAID6 on my Qnap that contains production stuffs.
I run RAID5 on my old Qnap (the one mentioned above) that is used for volatile storage (stuffs I can lose and not give a damned about).

So that's my thought on the subject when it comes to personal use.
I've been impressed with the WD Red for price-per-storage-per-durability-and-performance for a few years now, and wouldn't give a second thought to using them again.

Now if we were talking about a datastor for ESX or something.... that's a whole other ball of wax!
 
Thank you both for the help.
I have a 3 terabyte WD green drive and I am worried about the failure rate that a lot of people have told me they have had.
I looked into a small home NAS but saw that the performance could run into issues when streaming movies in 1080p because of the lack of a graphics card or low amount of RAM. I figure if I build a small weak windows 8 pc and use a small graphics card and then I should never run into issues. I also could use it as a PC in case I needed to.
I think I am going to get two WD Red drives.
Thanks again!
 
We've had good experiences with the WD Reds for NAS's.....optimized BIOS for RAID compatibility, and the "intellipower" varying spin rates so they can run cooler (variable speeds from 5400-7200 rpm). In our own Synology RS2212+ at the office...transfer rates are great right at gigabit rates.

WD RE series also are very good...technically higher grade drives (true enterprise). High performance.

We have not seen Blues or Greens have good reliability...we try to avoid them.
 
Thanks everyone. I bought 1 WD Red 4 terabyte from new egg the other day. Going to start with that and have a copy on my green drive until it fries lol.
 
Ed_Zipper said:
I used to swear by WD Black or Gold. Then I read a report that showed there was no difference from the Blue drives. Doh....
Click to expand...

you talking about that Backblaze report? problem with that report is...they based that on a data center with optimal conditions....65*F temps, conditioned power, and no movement/vibrations. Not a very realistic report.
 
I don't think I'm mistaken, but it is my understanding that all drives start out in life as Datacenter drives. As they are tested, and the drives continue to fail the most critical Datacenter tests (WD Re is most critical test for WD SATA drives), they are then tested to the next product line down the chain, WD Se in this case, then Black, Red, Blue and finally Green.So if you do put those WD Green drives in to a machine, you really are asking for trouble, as they have failed all previous tests, and can only sustain 5400RPM transfer speeds.

Personally, I always use WD Blacks in desktops and laptops when the customer doesn't want or need an SSD.

Maybe Luke @lcoughey can verify?

Andy
 
Last edited:
Ed_Zipper said:
I used to swear by WD Black or Gold. Then I read a report that showed there was no difference from the Blue drives. Doh....
Click to expand...
Well, if it helps, there is certainly a difference in the actual parts used between the various versions of hard drives. As you spend more on the drives, the following components improve:

- magnet
- heads
- spindle & bearings
- platters
- PCB

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good your hard drive is, it will eventually crash and it will now be a question of how good your backup routines have been.
 
Slaters Kustum Machines said:
I think the warranty alone warrants the price of Blacks.
Click to expand...
It depends on what the terms of the warranty are. I imagine that you get a remanufactured drive as replacement, which may or may not last the balance of the original's warranty.

Frankly, having suffered through a warranty claim (with Seagate, not WD) that involved returning the failed drive, and its replacement, and ending up with one that didn't work (BSOD in two different machines), I don't think I'd bother again. I certainly wouldn't pay more for a drive solely on the strength of the length of warranty.

I do acknowledge @lcoughey's observations on the different component quality – clearly, not all drives are equal (but we know that anyway).
 
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