Opinions on Western Digital internal HDs?

"No, I don't thank you for the fish at all" (notindetroit)
12/23/2014 at 00:16 • Filed to: None

Pretty much as the title says.

EDIT: What about the Blue line specifically? Will they stand up to relatively heavy duty stuff? The comments have been telling me to stay away from the Green line.

DISCUSSION (8)

Sportwägen, Driver Of The Red Sportwagen > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/23/2014 at 00:23

Black- Faster than other brand's drives (Their performance HD, I have 2 1TB drives in my PC), But MUCH noisier than normal drives

Red- Large volume drives

Blue- Same as Red, lower energy consumption

Green- Same as Blue, billed as "Efficient" even though they only use like 10 Watts :P

Overall, they are pretty good for what they are

BaconSandwich is tasty. > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/23/2014 at 00:27

Pretty decent. As far as hard drives go, they're my preferred brand. I've been running two WD 500 GB black drives for a few years now without issue.

GLiddy > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/23/2014 at 00:43

If you plan to run them 24/7 then stay away from Green drives. I've got a 2TB Green drive that I've run continuously for 16 months and it's starting to throw errors. When I reboot it's started with the consistency check messages.

Just tossing this out for a Seagate Barracuda I abused that one by putting a 1TB model into a Tivo. After 11,000 hours of continuous operation, it failed, but it was cheap at the time.

Don't force light duty drives into heavy duty roles.

tromoly > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/23/2014 at 00:45

Black-level drives are great, I've had a WD 1TB Black for a few years with zero issues, really good performance as well.

Axial > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/23/2014 at 01:15

If you buy a WD Caviar Black or a Velociraptor, it'll be excellent. I've had mixed experience with their WD Caviar Green line; it had trouble reading and having to wait for it to spool up was a pain.

Anybody else find it funny that WD names their drives after sea critters, but Seagate does not?

Redbulldidlo > Sportwägen, Driver Of The Red Sportwagen
12/23/2014 at 01:55

Red isn't for volume, it's for NAS, less temperature sensitive, and made to run constantly.

Manwich - now Keto-Friendly > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/23/2014 at 02:31

The blue line is their el cheapo line.

If you want heavy duty stuff and lots of capacity, get their 7200rpm Black or their data center focused RE series. Their XE series is even more heavy duty with a SAS interface and a 10,000rpm spindle speed. The Black, RE and XE hard drives all have 5 year warranties. The Blue series only has a 2 year warranty. That alone should speak volumes.

There's nothing wrong with the Green series... just that it's geared toward low cost, lots of capacity and low power consumption instead of performance. It's okay for a NAS box, or a 2nd hard drive just for non-critical archiving/backups. But you wouldn't want it as a primary hard drive.

In the past, I bought the WD Black series for myself and also IBM/Hitachi Deskstars/Ultrastars which also have a 5 year warranty:

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.p…

They used to be good bang for the buck but they're noisy... or at least they were.

Years ago, IBM went through some problems with their Deskstars... but they'd be fine if you did the firmware update. That HD division was sold off to Hitachi.

If you want all-out performance, no noise and less power consumption, then get the OCZ Vertex 460 solid state drive. It just costs more per GB. It has a 3 year warranty.

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.p…

Or you can pay a little more and get an OCZ Vector 150 solid state drive which is a little faster and has a 5 year warranty.

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.p…

Satoshi "Zipang" Katsura > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/23/2014 at 02:38

WD Black² (Dual Drive SSHD drive, 120GB SSD and 1TB HDD) user here. Both my old Black Slim (1 TB SSHD) and this worked flawlessly.